Considered as a pocket history of Messiaen’s large-scale writing, this set could hardly be improved upon. We hear the composer’s fastidious training with Dukas in Poèmes pour Mi (1936 37), his boldest engagement with the post-war modernist innovations of form and timbre led by his pupils Boulez and Stockhausen in Chronochromie (1959 60) and then the hieratic splendour of La Transfiguration (1965 69), which unifies all the elements of his creative world with a wholeness of vision hardly even surpassed by his opera on the life of St Francis.

All five commercial recordings of La Transfiguration live up to the ambitions of the piece, but Nagano’s might be the finest yet. Pierre-Laurent Aimard leads the argument in Messiaen’s take on ‘How lovely are thy dwelling places’, the fifth movement in the first of the work’s pair of septénaires, without making a crude contrast between the piano part and the glowing grandeur of the choral writing and the supple legato of the commentaries from solo flute and cello. Aside from Aimard, all the solo instrumental parts are beautifully taken by members of the orchestra.

The liveness of these recordings manifests itself not in coughing or applause but in the impetus of gestures and timing of pauses, bringing continuity to what can otherwise become disparate or isolated episodes, both in the more rebarbative stretches of Chronochromie and in the ritual unfolding of La Transfiguration. I also appreciate the realistic concert-hall perspective of Jenny Daviet’s soprano in Poèmes pour Mi, balanced so that her soprano entwines in Pelléas-like rapture with the orchestral texture rather than (as in Renée Fleming’s Decca recording – 6/12) sailing above it.

Both the unison chanted melismas of La Transfiguration and the fearsome complexities of Chronochromie rely for their effect on absolute rhythmic precision, and here Nagano’s direction is second to none, not even Boulez in Cleveland for Chronochromie. What may convert sceptics to the cause, however, is the ‘BRSO sound’ familiar from Kubelík’s Mahler and Jansons’s Brahms, say, but less often encountered in modernist repertoire, which smooths off rough edges without diminishing the massive scale and sense of wonder evoked by Messiaen to depict the gates of Heaven in the fifth movement of the second septénaire. Nagano’s embedded connection with this music is reinforced in the booklet by a personal memoir; insightful in itself but scant compensation for a full account of the music. Sung texts are printed in miniature. Otherwise, the set is not to be missed.