This completes Håkon Austbø’s survey of Messiaen’s piano music; more than completes it, in fact, since so far as I know it includes the only recording of Les offrandes oubliées in its little-known keyboard version. The subtle colours mentioned by the composer in his note on the work in its original orchestral guise (of a passage in the third section, for example, scored for nine solo strings: ‘reds, golds, blues, like a distant stained glass window’) cannot be captured here, but Austbø gives the piece a sort of chaste pallor which is just as effective in its own way. In fact that closing section, an evocation of the Eucharist, may sound more like mature Messiaen (it is, in fact, very early; he was 22) in this version.

The shorter pieces are all excellent, the Rondeau a more convincing proof of Messiaen’s good humour than the Fantaisie burlesque, which was intended to demonstrate it; the latter, though, shows his fondness for jazz and has a foretaste of the later Messiaen’s water music. The piece in memory of Dukas is solemnly grand; the much later Prélude is filled with big and strikingly bold sonorities. The 33-minute evocation of a day in the life of quite a few garden warblers is finest in its last section, where the blue lake overlooked by sunlit green and gold heights and the magically still evening are beautifully evoked.

The playing throughout is very brilliant, but earlier on I could have done with a few more subdued colours and for those ever-returning warblers to have been a touch less vociferous at times. But no one who has been collecting Austbø’s Messiaen series is likely to be disappointed by its conclusion, and the recording is up to standard.