By the time he was 30, in 1938, Olivier Messiaen had already impressed as a gifted composer of instrumental music for organ (for example Le banquet céleste) and orchestra (Les offrandes oubliées). From our present perspective this early music may seem less startlingly original and challenging than many of his later compositions, yet there is a boldness, a delight in experiment, pervading the vocal pieces written between 1930 and 1938 that makes them a natural and rewarding choice for the ever-enterprising team of Barbara Hannigan and Bertrand Chamayou.

Taken in order of composition, the sequence begins with a rarely heard oddity. La mort du nombre (1930) is a scena in which Messiaen as poet-composer tackled the still-volcanic aftermath of the Wagnerian ‘love-death’ that ends Tristan und Isolde. The problem, which he would triumphantly overcome a decade and more later in Turangalîla and Cinq Rechants, is that Wagner-echoing music, awkwardly diluted, cannot possibly do justice to such a fevered amalgam of contemporary sexual and spiritual passions. By the mid-1940s, the distance provided by Indian and other more oriental musical materials would offer escape from all those 19th-century Western European allusions that make La mort du nombre a curious but fascinating failure.

The two substantial song-cycles on which the programme centres – Poèmes pour Mi (1936) and Chants de terre et de ciel (1938) – are very different, and the combined commitment and artistry of Hannigan and Chamayou generates exactly the kind of forceful expressiveness that these sometimes extravagantly eccentric songs demand. The nine Poèmes pour Mi, arranged into two books of four and five items respectively, encapsulate the composer’s devoted tribute to Claire Delbos, a gifted violinist, in the year of their marriage. This intense meditation on the sacrament of holy matrimony can come across as both sententious and featureless in performances less strongly characterised than this one. But if on its completion Messiaen came to feel that it was all too decorous and even neutral in spirit, he quickly moved to the opposite extreme in the six-part Chants de terre et de ciel. Here a vertiginous trajectory encompasses two songs which chart the hopes and anxieties of marriage, then two which depict with astonishing clarity and candour the joys of parenthood – a son, Pascal, was born in 1938. But the last two movements make a radical shift in tone to confront the inevitability of death, and also – for believers – the terrifying grandeur of rebirth into eternal life: of resurrection.

The empathy with which Hannigan and Chamayou carve out the cycle’s radical spiritual progression is guaranteed to demolish all but the most severely principled resistance to the Messiaen ethos. There is no call for neo-operatic ranting here, yet the effect, given the well-judged intimacy of the recording’s acoustic perspectives, pushes persistently at the borders of restraint. Even so, however, the cycle’s generic affiliations are never breached and the result, is – no other word will do – overwhelming. It is even possible to feel that Messiaen never quite surpassed this youthful cri de coeur.