Messiaen: Fantaisie burlesque

“It's axiomatic (to use a favourite word of the French) that the Messiaens' own 1962 disc of Visions is irreplaceable. At the same time it raises the common interpretative problem when composers play their own music: should we follow what they say in musical and verbal notes, or what they do? Such problems don't arise with the three early pieces, which hardly show Messiaen at his best, but the metronome mark for the very slow first movement of Visions, which literally sets the groundwork for the cycle, dictates a duration of 6'15". He and his wife, Yvonne Loriod, dispatch it in 4'30". Steven Osborne and Martin Roscoe (like the old Regis recording by Peter Hill and Benjamin Frith) prefer to believe the score, and the result is an impressively relentless sweep from the faintest pppp to a searing fff.
Messiaen's library was full of astonomical picture- books, and his interpretation of the whole work brings out the violence and local disorder involved in the act of creation, even if the ultimate goal (here, a resplendent A major chord) is always in view. This superbly engineered Hyperion disc is true to his Technicolor vision.
Indeed, it's in the rich and immediate piano sound that this version scores most notably over Hill and Frith's, where the playing is no less accurate or intense. Particularly beautiful is a sudden pianissimo early in the fourth movement, and there are some decidedly upfront birds from Osborne in the next. (Messiaen always insisted that townspeople, who knew only the sparrow, had no idea how deafening birds in a forest could be.) In the final movement Osborne and Roscoe throw authenticity aside; their Modéré, joyeux goes uninhibitedly for the second epithet. And wonderfully exciting it is.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Only a pile-up of adjectives, to which should be added coruscating and addictively dithyrambic, could do justice” Sunday Times

“They produce an orchestral range of colour, and there seems to be an eternity of space and time for Messaien's music to vibrate, with its whiffs of incense and flutterings of birdsong. Yet this is one of the faster recordings, and the enormous dynamic range (from the most delicate pppp to a Steinway-threatening triple forte) is accommodated superbly by a demonstration-class recording.” Andrew McGregor, bbc.co.uk, 20th November 2004

“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