Messiaen

This all-Messiaen album represents Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan’s first collaboration with the French pianist Bertrand Chamayou. The French composer’s two major song cycles of the 1930s, setting texts by Messiaen himself, celebrate family life: we hear first Chants de Terre et de Ciel (Songs of Earth and Sky) of 1938, written after the birth of his first child, Pascal; then the slightly earlier Poèmes pour Mi of 1936, “Mi” being Messiaen’s nickname for his wife. Suffused with the composer’s Catholic faith, the music in both cycles not only “glistens” as he suggested, but shines at a level of ecstasy requiring full immersion and identification, as Hannigan and Chamayou fully realise here. Finally, La Mort du Nombre (The death of number) (1930) presents a dialogue for two souls—a tenor and soprano—accompanied by piano and violin. Hannigan and Chamayou are joined by two excellent young performers: tenor Charles Sy is suitably plangent as the suffering soul, while violinist Vilde Frang makes an effective transition from dusky melancholy at the start to transfigured ecstasy as she duets with Hannigan, the violin’s music finally rising high above Chamayou’s liquescent flow of notes.