How many, one wonders, in that first audience of the Quartet for the End of Time in Stalag VIII-A on January 15, 1941, saw through the music’s extraordinary immediacy to glimpse its future stature? Messiaen’s magical tapestry of quartets, an unaccompanied solo (for clarinet in the third movement, which predated Messiaen’s capture), two duos (cello and piano in the fifth span, violin and piano in the finale) and a trio (the fourth) requires audiences to reset their listening compass almost with each movement. Many works are of their time but Messiaen’s Quartet seems almost frozen at the moment of its initial performance, its special character – despite references back to earlier pieces and, greater still, pre-echoes of classics to come, Turangalîla not least – locked into the personalities of those first players, their borrowed and battered instruments, and the literally captive audience.

There are, nonetheless, different interpretational routes through Messiaen’s eight movements, especially the presentation of the small number of volatile passages – such as the opening and close of the second movement, ‘Vocalise, pour l’ange qui annonce la fin du temps’ (recapitulated in movement seven). The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble do not quite catch the awe-inspiring presence of the Angel that, for example, EMI’s and Decca’s celebrity quartets managed. Attitudes to tempo here are instructive of the overall approaches taken, the Left Coast ensemble emphasising the contemplative elements of Messiaen’s often enraptured score.

The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble take the Quartet’s shifting instrumental and emotional perspectives in their stride. Pick of the soloists is clarinettist Jerome Simas, who shines in the unaccompanied ‘Abîme des oiseaux’. Cellist Tanya Tomkins and violinist Anna Presler acquit themselves nicely in the two ‘Louange’ movements, one or two intonational infelicities aside. Pianist Eric Zivian provides the glue that binds this fine account together.

Presler and Zivian combine again in the Messiaen-inspired one wing (2019) by Kurt Rohde, the Ensemble’s viola player. This takes as its point of departure the Angel not of the Quartet but of Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise. It makes a fascinating and substantial coupling (not, perhaps, as hefty as Shostakovich’s Second Trio on Decca), a chamber-music duo for after the End of Time. Avie’s sound is very natural and resonant.