KEY POINTS:
French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard made his Deutsche Grammophon debut last year with Bach's Art of Fugue, transforming this most austere and cerebral of works into pianistic poetry.
He returns with a special offering for the Messiaen centenary and, having studied piano with Messiaen's wife, Yvonne Loriod, he has a unique insight into the music of this composer that he hails in his eloquent booklet essay as "a creator of time and colour".
Messiaen's Preludes, written a decade after the death of Debussy, share some of the impressionist ambience of the older composer. Yet Messiaen's almost obsessive exploration of bell effects and individual harmonies reveal new worlds being navigated.
Such is Aimard's alchemy that one can almost hear the melding of orange-blues and violet-purples that Messiaen himself saw in the fifth prelude, The Impalpable Sounds of the Dream.
Messiaen's encyclopaedic collecting of birdsong forms the basis of his 1956-58 Catalogue d'Oiseaux. Aimard includes just two of these avian dialogues, fashioning them as little pieces of ornithological theatre, especially when the wood lark warbles against dark chordal forests that could have strayed in from behind the cuckoo in Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals.
While Aimard has made a specific curator's choice in the tracks selected, it is a shame that, with a running time of only 45 minutes, the disc could not have included all four of the Quatre Etudes de Rythme, a work that has been described as the musical equivalent of splitting the atom. The pair of fiery Iles de feu live up to their name, but it would have been lovely to have heard the remaining two studies they blaze so magnificently around.
William Dart
