During June and July 1956 Messiaen recorded what was then his complete published output for the organ. With a number of recent recordings of these works by various players, most of whom claim in one way or another the composer's approval of their performance, it is certainly worth hearing how Messiaen himself approached his organ music. Not only that, the recordings were made on the very instrument for which most of it had been written, so there's no doubt that the sounds we hear are the very sounds he had in mind when setting out his very specific registration. I wonder, though, whether Messiaen really was happy with the awful problems from the pedal Bombarde on bottom C during the recording of ''Combat de la mort et de la vie'' (from Les corps glorieux), and the instrument throughout each of the sessions was out of tune in a way which only French organs seem to know how.
Despite such dreadful out-of-tuneness, however, it is still refreshing to hear mutations and high-pitched stops which have a gentle, smoothly-blended quality quite at variance with their shrill and screaming counterparts on some of the instruments which have been used in more recent recordings. (It does seem a little perverse of EMI to have included with these discs the specification of the Sainte-Trinite organ as it now stands rather than as it was at the time these recordings were made.) The recordings themselves, even considering their vintage, have hardly stood up well to the passage of time and the transfers to CD have cruelly highlighted some appallingly blatant edits in the originals.
Such faults pale into insignificance against performances of such magnitude as these. Composers are notoriously fickle when it comes to performing their own music, but with a few exceptions (the first part of Diptyque being the most obvious, where the innumerable pauses, rallentandos and general changes of speed, not to mention more than a few smudges and slips, have no basis in the printed score) Messiaen not only fulfils his own written requirements, but does so with utter conviction and persuasiveness. The absolute precision of the rhythmic detail in ''Reprises par Interversion'' (from Livre d'orgue) would be spellbinding were it not for the fact that it all sounds as natural as breathing, and I marvel at Messiaen's immaculate measuring of grace notes, not least the recurring four-note figure of ''La Vierge et L'Enfant'' (from La nativite); how sensible it sounds, how easily it all flows. Even a heart-stopping pause just before ''Dieu parmi nous'' (also from La nativite) breaks into its dazzling Toccata (at bar 59, 5'35'') is not totally contradictory to the score—although I doubt whether any other organist would dare to keep us waiting for quite such a long time here.
This all adds up, not only to a valuable historical reference which nobody intending to perform this music could afford to ignore, but, in spite of its manifest shortcomings, to something which still stands head and shoulders above any of the other recordings in the current catalogue of this much-missed composer.'