DG’s in-house Messiaen expert Myung-Whun Chung leads performances of the niche Trois Petites Liturgies and Hymne as part of the label’s centenary celebrations. Having just listened to Chung’s account of the Turangalîla-Symphonie for a Gramophone “Collection” (A/08), his idiosyncratic approach to Messiaen continues to baffle me. His Turangalîla is perfumed and standoffish, and this is another disc of soft-focus, overly precious Messiaen.

The Trois Petites Liturgies (1944) is one of Messiaen’s more unassuming creations, a meditation on “three kinds” of divine presence. Messiaen himself described it as “above all [being] music of colour” and Marcel Couraud, in his classic 1964 recording (available in Warner Classic’s centenary edition), goes to enormous efforts to delineate the interweaving layers of overlapping harmonic colours. Chung, in notable contrast, blends Messiaen’s palette into a manufactured middle ground that robs the music of structural shaping and potential for light and shade. In the opening moments, the soft-pedalled chorus are made to fold seamlessly into Roger Muraro’s piano obbligato, where Couraud demonstrates what can be achieved if the piano is allowed a slight edge. The ondes martenot is often pushed into the background, and the Stravinskian rhythmic push of the second movement turns into something more akin to John Rutter.

Chung’s mission seems to be to deny Messiaen’s modernism in favour of his debt to Fauré and Debussy. He gets away with it in the early Debussian, Dukas-like Hymne, but the more self-consciously modernist Couleurs de la Cité Céleste lacks contour and physicality.