Serious pianists are unlikely to put in the time it takes to learn the 177 pages of Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus unless they relish the music’s extraordinary blend of post-Lisztian rhetoric and post-Debussyan refinement. This must be one reason why poor recordings of the work are so rare, and collectors are currently spoiled for choice, at both extremes of the price range. At full price, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Steven Osborne are the leading contenders; and at super-budget price, Naxos’s 1994 release now has a rival on Arte Nova.

Martin Zehn’s playing suggests that he is not especially sympathetic to Messiaen’s intensely Catholic brand of spirituality; his slightly edgy playing of the first piece’s timelessly serene repetitions of its bell-like sonorities is an indication of what could be a certain impatience with the music’s more contemplative aspects. Comparison with Håkon Austbø on Naxos confirms that Austbø plays with greater delicacy, for example in the complex textural superimpositions of No 5, and he is aided by a recording of wider dynamic range. On the other hand, in the bold toccata which begins No 10, Zehn’s articulation is more sharply defined, and here, as in the grand heroics of No 20, the greater degree of resonance in the Naxos recording, combined with Austbø’s relatively liberal pedalling, blurs the sharper edges on which the full dramatic impact of the music depends.

Zehn is at his best in the music’s more secular aspects, like the exuberant roulades of birdsong: but there is certainly no shortage of tenderness in a movement like No 15, or of voltage in the many bravura episodes. The recorded sound seems to restrict his dynamic range (is the ending truly fff?) and to lack some of the atmosphere so vital to this music. But now that Austbø’s account has been available for the best part of a decade, this new budget-priced version is well worth trying out.