Messiaen – Catalogue d’Oiseaux

Composer(s):

Olivier Messiaen
Release Date: 30-03-2018
PTC: 5186670
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Tracks

CD1

Olivier Messiaen: Catalogue d'Oiseaux

Audio Player 1) 1er Livre: I. Le Chocard des Alpes (The Alpine Chough) 9:27
Audio Player 3) 1er Livre: III. Le Merle bleu (The Blue Rock Thrush) 12:59
Audio Player 4) 2e Livre: IV. Le Traquet Stapazin (The Black-eared Wheatear) 14:05

CD2

Audio Player 7) 4e Livre: VII. La Rousserolle Effarvatte (The Reed Warbler) 31:37
Total Tracks 13
Total Duration 02hr 30min

Album information

Renowned French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard kicks off his exclusive engagement to PENTATONE with a recording of Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux (1956-1958). The pianist had intimate ties to the composer himself and his wife, Yvonne Loriod, for whom Messiaen wrote the Catalogue. Praised by The Guardian as “one of the best Messiaen interpreters around,“ this is Aimard’s first recording of Messiaen’s most extensive, demanding and colourful piano composition. The luxurious CD box set contains an accompanying bonus DVD, on which Aimard shares his vast knowledge of and love for Messiaen’s work from behind the piano.

Due to its radical naturalism, the Catalogue d’Oiseaux is exceptional within the repertoire for solo piano. It is the grand hymn to nature from a man who never ceased to marvel at the stupefying beauty of landscapes or the magic of bird song.

With his Catalogue, Messiaen tried – in his own words – “to render exactly the typical birdsong of a region, surrounded by its neighbours from the same habitat, as well as the form of song at different hours of the day and night,” suggesting an almost scientific approach to his subjects. The idea of ‘reproduction’ may have been central to Messiaen’s conception of the Catalogue d’Oiseaux, but in the finished work we hear a great composer at work, a master of innovative structures who finds an astonishing range of piano sonorities.

In a world that is increasingly being destroyed by man, Aimard views this cycle as “a musical refuge that resonates with an audience ever more concerned, expanded and affected.”

SACD version out of print, stereo version available as PTC5187214