Messiaen: Vingt Regards sur l'enfant Jésus (Twenty gazes on the Christ-child) - CD

“…this handsome set from EMI is well worth considering. With works spanning his output, a range of genres and some wonderful performances…” BBC Music Magazine, November 2008 *****

“The 14-CD EMI set is one of those incredibly useful, disarmingly cheap, completist pulltogethers, this one boasting classic Messiaen moments like Previn's 1977 Turangalîla-Symphonie, Dorati's penetrating 1964 Chronochromie, Rattle's Eclairs sur l'Au-delà, Martha Argerich's and Alexandre Rabinovitch's Visions de l'Amen and Messiaen's own performances of his organ works.
For those wanting to look deeper into Messiaen's evolution and history, the Accord set of early recordings featuring Messiaen, Loriod and contemporary acolytes is essential. The set begins with Messiaen's and Loriod's 1962 recording of Visions de l'Amen (their second version; an original 1949 account is lost to hopeless sound) and it's a cunningly paced, keenly nuanced performance where articulation and timbre have been carefully considered. Loriod's 1956 account of the Vingt regards has a thrilling atmosphere of discovery, and the Catalogued'oiseaux she cut in '59 has bravura attack, although her later Erato set is more seasoned.
In the mid-1950s Pierre Boulez's Domain Musical society gave many Messiaen premieres, and Boulez's account of the insanely exacting Sept Haïkaï and a joyous performance of Oiseauxexotiques from Rudolf Albert, recorded at Domaine Musical events, enjoy a marvellous sense of time and place. Messiaen's own recording of the Quartet for the End of Time, featuring cellist Etienne Pasquier (with whom he was interred in Stalag VIII-A), is technically wobbly and shrill by modern standards, but has a rooted emotional authenticity that never tries too hard to make its point. The only low-point is Maurice Le Roux's Turangalîla: an apparently fine performance, but the recording is so lamely transferred it's impossible to tell either way.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“The 14-CD EMI set is one of the those incredibly useful, disarmingly cheap, EMI completist pull-togethers, this one boasting classic Messiaen moments like Previn's 1977 Turangalîla-Symphonie, Dorati's penetrating 1964 Chronochromie, Rattle's Eclairs sur l'Au-delà, Martha Argerich's and Alexandre Rabinovitch's Visions de l'Amen and Messiaen's own performances of his organ works.” Gramophone Magazine, May 2009

“No reservations…about Peter Hill's masterly set of the piano music, longheld in esteem by Messiaen-lovers,. Technical control, characterisation, colour, 'clarté': it's all here. Few if any pianists play the first and last movements of Vingt regards so slowly. Few approached his sense of a majestic mystery.” BBC Music Magazine, November 2008 *****

“Throughout‚ Hill limns Messiaen’s heady‚ quasi pantheistic amalgam of rapture and stillness‚ evocation and exultation with illuminating exuberance…Hill is supported by a recording of satisfyingly huge range…In Benjamin Frith, Hill has a duo partner as responsive to Messiaen’s demands for subtlety of colour and delicacy of texture as he is himself.” Gramophone Magazine

“…her playing is nothing short of magnificent – superb range of sonority, rock-sure rhythm, unfailing attention to polyphonic strands, thrilling attack and tender caress in equal measure. … Under her touch there seems to be no such thing as a worn-out harmony or an unmusical one.” Gramophone Magazine (on Yvonne Loriod's piano performances on these CDs)

“Messiaen's own performance of the large organ cycle Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte-Trinité is included amongst the goodies on offer here. …it is thoroughly compulsive listening, and definitive only in that it reveals just how much leeway is permitted. ...Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen's second wife... can be heard on 14 of the 26 works, many of them classic performances. There may be better sounding versions of the Vingt regards, but she is still riveting - the fearsome 'Par Lui tout a été fait' has rarely sounded more exciting.” BBC Music Magazine, October 2005