I appreciate Louise Bessette’s Messiaen because, in the age of Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s juggernaut brilliance, she brings humility to these finger-busting scores. Near the end of Cantéyodjayâ (at 8'45"), as Messiaen’s re-configuring mosaic jams itself into a mechanism that leaves the two hands spread-eagled at extreme ends of the keyboard, Bessette is man enough to fess up – this is an ungainly, gawky gesture that hijacks the grain of tidy classical niceties. Her technique is stretched, and we stretch in sympathy as boomy pianistic reverberation is supplanted by a pinched, sotto voce flatness.

Bessette walks your ears inside the moving cogs of Messiaen’s mosaic structure, where many pianists merely float them along its surface. From the clangourous timpani of resonating strikes at the opening to her responsive treatment of Messiaen’s transforming block-chord sequences, this performance has a rare depth of aural perspective. Individual tiles in the mosaic are not only juxtaposed: Bessette mediates between their shapes and characteristics, reminding us that Cantéyodjayâ is the link between the interlocking cycles inside Vingt Regards and the more fragmented Catalogue d’oiseaux.

La fauvette des jardins – written in 1970 as a satellite of Catalogue – is more straightforward structurally but Bessette keeps her keen antennae working on its transforming colours and delineated timbres. Messiaen’s last solo piano work, Petites esquisses d’oiseaux (1985), is often forgotten about. True enough, its sketchy restraint is no match for the ambition of its grandstanding cousins, but Bessette drills into its intricate details nevertheless. Listen to the flinty, uneven rattle of her upper register during the first movement at 2'05". I didn’t know pianos could sound like that.