December 6, Saturday 8:00 PM
First Pres Santa Monica

Olivier Messiaen
Twenty Glances at the Infant Jesus (1945)

Mark Robson, piano

From Messiaen’s most romantic and ecstatic period comes the Twenty Glances at the Infant Jesus, the deepest and widest conception for the grand piano in all of music history. This fabulously virtuosic twenty-movement symphony for solo piano was written for his twenty-year-old muse Yvonne Loriod (destined to be his wife), who memorized all the Fateful Glances! Loriod was one of Mark Robson’s teachers. His playing has been hailed as "massively virtuosic" and noted for its "display of dazzling speed, exquisite control and surprising delicacy" by the Los Angeles Times, declaring Robson’s performance of this work “world class.”