Peter Hill: Messiaen’s La Fauvette Passerinette, etc CD review – hugely rewarding

Olivier Messiaen’s greatest achievement of the 1950s was the Catalogue d’Oiseaux, seven books of piano pieces based on birdsong he’d transcribed in the wild. Apart from one further large-scale piece in 1970, La Fauvette des Jardins (The Garden Warbler), those pieces were his last significant works for the piano – though he continued to make extensive use of birdsong in all his orchestral and ensemble works for the rest of his life. But while working on Messiaen’s sketches in 2012, Peter Hill came upon what appeared to be several pages of a draft of a previously unknown piano work, dating from the summer of 1961.

La Fauvette Passerinette (The Subalpine Warbler) is virtually complete: the pencil manuscript includes the composer’s own reminder to write out a fair copy, and most of it already has pedalling and fingering indications. Messiaen had an otherwise barren year in 1961: this piece seems to have been intended as the start of a new piano cycle, in which he would treat birdsong in a very different way, with the transcriptions generating the harmonies rather than being imposed on harmonic backgrounds that evoked the bird’s habitat (a technique used in the Catalogue d’Oiseaux).

La Fauvette Passerinette represents a path Messiaen never followed further. Large-scale orchestral commissions would take priority, and by the time of La Fauvette des Jardins he was using songs in a different way again. As Hill’s performance shows, however, it’s an utterly convincing and thrilling piece of piano writing – a fierce, sustained 11-minute study as rigorous as Messiaen’s piano works of the late 1940s, and culminating in a ferocious toccata that squeezes every bit of musical content out of the raw material.

Hill surrounds this first recording of his exciting discovery with thoughtfully grouped sequences of 20th-century piano works, beginning with Ravel’s Oiseaux Tristes, from Miroirs, and including five more pieces by Messiaen, including La Colombe (The Dove), from the early set of Preludes, the first of the Île de Feu pieces from the Quatre Études de Rythmes, and one portrait from Catalogue d’Oiseaux, the exuberant Le Traquet Stapazin (The Black-eared Wheatear). There are also pieces by some of Messiaen’s pupils – Stockhausen, Benjamin, Murail – as well as by Dutilleux, Sculthorpe, Knussen, Julian Anderson, Douglas Young and Takemitsu, all performed with the lucidity that is a hallmark of Hill’s playing. Altogether, it is a hugely rewarding and important disc.