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Gramophone

Roderick Chadwick’s 2020 recital ‘La mer bleue’, featuring the first book of Catalogue d’oiseaux alongside Szymanowski and Gorton, set a notable marker for the pianist’s credentials in Messiaen. These are amply consolidated in a follow-up that interposes the next four books of the composer’s piano masterpiece with music from previous and later generations,

Opening with ‘Le traquet stapazin’ is an astute move, this being the most accessible piece of the cycle with its lush evocation of a Mediterranean landscape. Chadwick renders it with due sensitivity, then is hardly less attuned to the nocturnal plangency of ‘La chouette hulotte’ and twilit remoteness of ‘L’aloutette-lulu’. Between these books, Sadie Harrison’s Lunae explores aspects of the natural world via four nocturnes whose impressionistic take on music past and present reaches its climax in the fervent ‘Of Stars and Nightingales’. Ending this first volume, the six pieces that comprise Julian Anderson’s Sensation explore facets of musical time as these accrue intensity from the sparseness of ‘She Hears’ to the luminous textures of ‘Alba’.

The second volume begins with ‘Le rousserolle effarvatte’, the centrepiece of Messiaen’s cycle with the interplay between bird(s), place and time at its most resourceful and imaginative. In contrast comes the whimsical elegance of ‘Alouette calandrelle’ hen the impetuous animation of ‘Le bouscarle’, whose virtuosity Chadwick projects with unfailing assurance. He is no less inside the alluring poise of Chanson d’approche, a concert study in which Betsy Jolas channels birdsong along a more formal trajectory, exuding a more spontaneous expressive profile. Nor do the Prélude by Debussy and the Nocturne by Grieg sound at all anticlimactic in rounding off thus sequence, especially when played with such fastidious charm.

This release is enhanced by Chadwick’s detailed notes, together with Messiaen’s prefaces to each of the pieces. The only reservation concerns a recording that, while it lacks nothing in clarity, feels a little too enclosed fully to convey dynamic nuance and tonal resonance, but this is a minor blemish on an impressive achievement such as warrants urgent investigation.