Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux clearly means a great deal to to Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who studied with the composer and his wife, Yvonne Loriod – for whom the cycle was composed. Two years ago, Aimard marked the end of his tenure as artistic director of the Aldeburgh festival with a dawn-to-dusk performance of the pieces at Snape Maltings and the RSPB reserve at Minsmere. This, however, is the first time he has recorded the complete cycle of all 13 of the portraits of French birds, divided into seven books, which make up Messiaen’s most substantial work for piano. These discs – marking the start of a new partnership with Pentatone – show the same combination of fierce precision and marvelling fantasy that came across in the live performances at Aldeburgh.
As Aimard demonstrates vividly, the Catalogue is one of the greatest, and most original, of all 20th-century keyboard works. The pieces transcend the songs on which they are based; this is much more than cosy description.
There’s a virtuosic fierceness to some of the writing – in the rattling outbursts of the fourth piece, Le Traquet Stapazin (The Black-Eared Wheatear), for instance, or in the almost Lisztian flourishes that usher in the penultimate piece Le Traquet Rieur (The Black Wheatear) – while the nocturnal ruminations of the two pieces in the third book, La Chouette Hulotte (The Tawny Owl) and L’Alouette Lulu (The Woodlark), explore a darkly different world altogether.
The recordings capture all that dexterity, and every nuance of the wonderfully varied keyboard colour that Aimard brings to the piano writing.
The pieces are generously spread across three CDs, so that the central panel of the cycle, the half-hour long La Rousserolle Effarvatte (The Reed Warbler), has the second disc to itself. With such room to spare, it’s a shame that Aimard does not also include the piece that Messiaen composed in 1970 as a appendix to the Catalogue, La Fauvette des Jardins (The Garden Warbler), which proved to be his last major piano work, and is perhaps the finest of all his solo-piano bird portraits. As it is, though, this collection is arguably the best of the available versions of the complete Catalogue, especially as Peter Hill’s recordings (made in collaboration with Messiaen in the 1980s), appear to be currently unavailable.
