Martin Zehn, described on the CD case as a ‘contemporary music specialist’, has all the technique that the more spectacularly virtuoso pages of the Catalogue demand: the ‘Golden Oriole’ (No 2) skips nimbly amid the oak trees of the Charente, the rich chords that surely suggest their trunks admirably voiced; the cry of the ‘Reed Warbler’ (No 6), which according to Messiaen has something of a squeaky cork, a xylophone, string pizzicatos and harp glissandos to it, does indeed recall all those things. Zehn produces beautiful sounds, too: the song of the Spectacled Warbler, one of the companions of the ‘Black-eared Wheatear’ (No 4), is, as Messiaen says, ‘exquisite’.
But the Catalogue is also a sketchbook of French landscapes: Messiaen’s annotations abound in precise descriptions of wooded hills, plunging cliffs, of blue or green water, of dazzling sunlight or gloomy mist. And these are broad and spacious landscapes, in which the ‘Buzzard’ (No 9) can soar in majestic circles before descending, in which the ‘Woodlark’ (No 6) is first heard high in the sky, then approaches and retreats again. Zehn is less successful at conveying these because his dynamic range is somewhat restricted (he is seldom really quiet) and because the recording lacks atmosphere: West German Radio’s Bismarcksaal in Cologne seems, at least as rendered here, to have little or no reverberance. The still landscape inhabited by the ‘Short-toed Lark’ (No 8) is delicately suggested, but more often Zehn’s birds are in the foreground and his colours tend towards hard brightness: excellent when portraying the fantastic ‘stone monsters’ that are the ‘Rock Thrush’s’ (No 10) habitat, or the sinister resonances awakened by the ‘Tawny Owl’ (No 5), but subtler effects are quite often missed. Both Peter Hill and Haakon Austbo are recorded in more sympathetic acoustics and both – especially Hill – have a wider dynamic range and thus a much richer palette.'