It's fascinating to hear these pieces played by a pianist from the former Soviet Union who, when he first encountered them, can have had little contact with the already established tradition of playing them. His instinctive and entranced response to this music is evident throughout this recording; the accompanying booklet tells us that he was so bowled over by the Catalogue that he made his own performing copy of it, even inventing a system of notation to reduce the number of page-turns. He now apparently plays the cycle from memory, a well-nigh unprecedented feat.
In the absence of a direct line to the 'Messiaen tradition', Ugorski has drawn upon his own, that of the Russian romantic virtuoso, and the music often responds splendidly to his bravura and massive sonority. Messiaen, after all, is very often evoking natural phenomena much larger than birds: coastal cliffs, ravines, mountains, forests and estuaries, to say nothing of that terrifying lighthouse siren in ''Le courlis cendre'', and in any case most of his bird songs have been fairly radically transformed into pianistic gesture. Wherever a rocky crag needs to be delineated in bold strokes of grainy black or an arid stony waste under a pitiless sun is to be conjured up with steel-fingered precision, Ugorski is unfailingly vivid. His playing also has overt, even showy virtuosity, an element in Messiaen's style that should not be underestimated, and which gives his account of the breathtakingly difficult central section of ''La rousserolle effarvatte'' an almost Lisztian brio.
I have not made a detailed, bar-by-bar comparison with Peter Hill's already classic performances on Unicorn-Kanchana, but was often drawn back to check on details of interpretation, several times to listen to entire movements in Hill's readings. On the whole I find his responses more detailed, his range of colour and attack much wider (Ugorski consistently adopts louder dynamics and more extreme gradations). No less importantly, Hill generally allows more time, not always by playing more slowly but allowing silences their maximum effect (fearful silences are an important part of the spell-like effect of ''Le courlis cendre'', for example, and Ugorski often understates them) and by giving the alluring strangeness of Messiaen's sonorities space in which to register fully. Ugorski's sheer dash and enthusiasm bring many rewards, but also risk over-statement: his black-eared wheatear (''Le traquet stapazin'') is a vociferous and vividly coloured creature about the size of an ostrich, and in ''L'alouette Lulu'' he distinctly implies that the nightingale may be a bird of prey. A fine recording, though, if a little too close at times to the jangling overtones of Messiaen's chords, and a pianist that I greatly look forward to hearing in other repertory. But enthusiasts of that repertory-Lisztians and Rachmaninov-lovers, shall we say-may very well find them- selves converted to Messiaen by this sort of playing.'