Yvonne Loriod's 1973 recording of the Vingt regards was for some while available only as part of a vast 17-disc Messiaen Edition which itself disappeared from the catalogue not long ago. Its re-release in a more manageable format is welcome. Like all of Messiaen's piano works it was written for and first performed by Loriod, and this recording has the additional authority of having been produced by Messiaen himself, so even the soft-textured, bassy and rather close piano presumably has his imprimatur. There is the further advantage that this is not one of those 'creator's recordings' that date from the early years of a work's life; by the time this recording was made Loriod (and Messiaen) had been playing and reflecting on the Regards for close on 30 years.
Her virtuosity is formidable, her authority felt on every page, and her love for the music is urgent and passionate. The curious thing is, though, that she is almost the only pianist in my experience to take Messiaen's suggested overall timing for the cycle (125 minutes) pretty well literally. Peter Hill's more reflective account adds well over a quarter of an hour to this, and there are still greater discrepancies between the timings of individual movements. Loriod takes ten minutes, for example, over the fifteenth Regard, ''Le baiser de l'Enfant Jesus'', to which Hakan Austbo (see above) adds close on four minutes, while in the very opening number, ''Regard du Pere'', Loriod is almost alone in reading its tempo indication of Extremement lent as meaning 'a shade over five minutes'; everyone else I've ever heard takes eight minutes or longer.
No one could possibly question the 'authenticity' of Loriod's approach, and I can't say that while listening to these two numbers in the context of the whole I found either of them hasty. But returning to her account from Hill's or Austbo's I do occasionally notice a certain severity in her manner, a slight reluctance to prolong silences, to allow the magic of a chord time to register. By the same token I can't say that I find Hill or Austbo slow at these points. Perhaps they too will be less rapt in their contemplations when they have lived with the cycle as long as she has. Of the three Hill is the more meditative, Loriod the most likely to make you aware of this music's roots in Liszt and in earlier French piano music, Austbo perhaps a happy mean between the two. But Loriod, undoubtedly, has an edge in the excitement she obviously still remembered when recording the Regards at discovering the vividness of this music, and its immaculate tailoring to her pianistic gifts. Her reading will retain its special place in the Messiaen discography.
The Petites esquisses were recorded much more recently (1987) and have a less resonant sound and a wider dynamic range. By that time I was so used to the softer sound of the earlier recordings that I found I preferred it, and was glad to revert to something similar in the still older (1968) readings of the Preludes and Etudes. Both these are beautifully played, Loriod making perfect musical sense of the arcane procedures of Mode de valeurs et d'intensites'' (the third of the Etudes), just as she searches out the pianistic, appealing and thoroughly French sounds that lie beneath her husband's frequent talk, in the Vingt regards, of ''asymmetical augmentations'' and ''non-retrogradable rhythms''. No, it's not severity that I sense in some passages, it's a brilliantly gifted performer's practicality, the ideal counterbalance to her husband's visionariness.'