The received wisdom is that Messiaen grew up at the keyboard, so to speak, but according to his teacher Marcel Dupré he never so much as set eyes on an organ console until the age of 18. Having won a first prize in composition at the Paris Conservatoire in 1930, he completed four major orchestral scores in four years. Paavo Järvi and Alpha have missed a trick by leaving out the third of them, the Hymne au Saint-Sacrament (1932), and replacing it with the composer’s late tribute to Mozart, Un sourire (1989), in a scrupulous studio account that in no way supersedes previous recordings directed by Jun Märkl (Naxos, 9/12) and Myung-Whun Chung (DG, 8/95).

Rather, it is the live performances of the prentice works that merit further attention. This is the first recording to do full justice to Le tombeau resplendissant, more accurately played than Chung, more imaginatively voiced than Märkl. The piece emerges not as an inferior sequel to Les offrandes oubliées but as a powerful and deeply personal symphonic poem in its own right, precociously establishing Messiaen’s orchestral voice for all the evident debts to Franck in form, Scriabin in harmony and Berlioz in orchestration – hardly negligible models to follow. It becomes understandable why the deeply private and secretive composer should have discouraged performances, having bared his soul and given vent to his anger over the death of his mother in both the work’s first and third sections and a written preface, helpfully printed in the booklet: ‘My youth is dead: it was I who killed it. Rage, where are you leading me?’ There’s nothing quite like it in the rest of Messiaen’s output.

Dukas taught him composition, and the influence of L’apprenti sorcier is writ large over the screeching violins and irresistible accelerando in the central panel of Les offrandes oubliées, where a similar expression of grief is subsumed in a crucifixion scene. Here and in the closing, serene depiction of celestial rapture there is a silky assurance that bodes promisingly for the relationship between the Zurich orchestra and their new director, as well as the new recording studio built in the basement of the Tonhalle.

L’Ascension is more subject to the vagaries of live recording – some questionable brass intonation in the opening movement, tangled textures in the Debussian tracery of the ‘Alléluias sereins’ – but again Järvi has the full measure of the piece. He sustains momentum and tension through some tricky, slow metronome marks and draws a sumptuously appointed weight of sound from the Tonhalle strings in the ecstatic ‘Prière du Christ montant a son Père’ while steering clear of both Stokowski’s showmanship and Chung’s ponderous solemnity. ‘One of my favourite works’, says Järvi in an enlightening booklet interview, and you can tell.