French bird names are so much more poetic than ours. After hearing the vivid dialogue of ''Le traquet rieur'', grandly punctuated by one of Messiaen's most evocative landscape gestures, who could ever sink to calling it a mere black wheatear? And how pleasant, for anyone who has followed Peter Hill thus far through the Catalogue, to re-encounter in that same piece the song of the splendidly-named and impressively-voiced Traquet Stapazin, to us no more than the spectacled warbler. ''Le courlis cendre'' is perhaps the most striking entry in this concluding volume (could we not call our equivalent the 'ashy' curlew?), with its perfectly non-onomatopoeic yet formidable evocation of mist and dark waves, its abrupt (and in this cycle unprecedented) introduction of the human sound-world, the frightening boom of a lighthouse siren, its uncanny portrayal of birds hovering and stooping over stilled water and its long, hypnotic monologue for the curlew itself.
But ''La buse variable'' (the buzzard: you see what I mean?) is in a way more daring still, its aviary of different birds simply presented and juxtaposed, with nothing to unify them but the open chords at outset and conclusion (an effective dual metaphor for the buzzard's silent, watchful circling and for the expanses of broad plain below and sky above) and the refrain of the mistle-thrush, cheerfully whistling a bar or two of Scott Joplin (I swear) to itself.
However, the real culmination of the cycle is the prodigious supplementary volume La fauvette des jardins (longer than the whole of Book 7 put together) that Messiaen added 12 years later, in 1970. It is the most virtuosic of his ornithological pieces, not only in its demands on the pianist (one's jaw drops at Peter Hill's prodigies of agile dexterity) but in the demands that are made of the composer's own powers of evocation. Darkness, and deep water sensed in darkness; the forms of trees separating themselves from darkness in the faintest light before dawn; the banded colours of a lake reflecting a livid, stormy sky; the return of the sun after the threat of storm (and with it a chorus of birds, culminating in the song of le loriot, the golden oriole, Messiaen's affectionately punning, dedicatory reference to his wife, Yvonne Loriod); the endlessly florid variations of la fauvette's (the garden warbler's song); and above all, one of the great moments in all Messiaen, the rapt evocation of a still, sunlit afternoon, ''every shade of blue: peacock, azure, sapphire''. This is also one of Peter Hill's great moments as a Messiaen interpreter, finely recorded as ever, and with the beautiful moonlit coda it sets an impressive seal on a most distinguished recording project.'