The Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine was the last work Messiaen composed in occupied Paris. First performed in 1944, it was also, with the exception of an organ mass based on his improvisations that appeared in 1950, the last with explicit Christian connotations that he would produce for 19 years. It’s clear now that in the late 1940s and 50s Messiaen had a crisis of faith, or at least he distanced himself from the Catholic church, because of his love for his young pupil, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, whom he would marry in 1961, after the death of his first wife Claire Delbos. Loriod played in the premiere of the Liturgies, and its sound world, which – in the original version recorded here, is scored for 18 sopranos, 16 solo strings and a gamelan-like group of piano, ondes Martenot, celesta, vibraphone and percussion – polarised opinion.

Now it’s possible to see in the work, its lush, almost sugary textures and the sometimes rampant exuberance that belie the devotional nature of its texts, anticipations of the Turangalila Symphony that would follow four years later. His symphony forms the centrepiece of a trilogy woven around the story of Tristan and Isolde, in which Messiaen celebrated sexual love, and another of those three works, the Cinq Rechants for 12 solo voices from 1948, also appears on this disc, along with the much more strait-laced 1937 motet O Sacrum Convivium. The Rechants is perhaps the most personal and unbuttoned of all Messiaen’s works, setting texts of his own with an invented, Sanskrit-like language, and depicting the sexual act itself in its central movement. It’s simultaneously earthy and refined, and not like anything else in the 20th-century choral repertory.

These Danish performances conducted by Marcus Creed are models of precision and lucidity; every vocal and instrumental strand is there. But it all comes across as rather cool, with neither the Liturgies nor the Rechants generating the sense of abandon and almost delirious ecstasy that the music constantly seems to be striving to express. Perhaps, though, Messiaen always knew that what he was attempting was impossible to achieve.