MESS I A EN. Visions de 'amen. Katia and Marielle Labéque (pnos). Erato ® MUS1 9046.

The Visions de l'anien, the fourth of Messiaen's great mystical (or, as he prefers to describe them, "theological") meditation-cycles, is the first of them to be written for piano (L'oscension, La nativité du Seigneur and Les corps g/orieux are all For organ), and his first major work for any medium Following the three wracking emotional crises that he experienced in the early 1940s: the war (including a period of internment in Stalag VIII), the beginnings of his wife's cruelly long incurable brain disease, and his meeting with Yvonne Loriod who, with the composer, gave the Visions their first performance. In the central vision of the cycle, the "Amen du désir", Messiaen portrays, in alternating melodies of rapt solemnity and turbulent exultation, "the soul seized by a terrible love that expresses itself carnally (as in the Song of Songs), yet there is nothing here of carnality, only a paroxysm of thirst for Love . . . in the coda, the two voices seem to melt into one, and only the harmonious silence of Heaven remains". 'Sublimation' would be a crassly inadequate and clinical term to apply to the transported intensity, the naïvely solemn joy of these musical visions, yet it is hard to avoid it. It cannot only be wisdom after the event (and the more 'earthly' sound of the piano compared to the organ) that makes the Visions de /'amen seem not only a continuation of Messiaen's sequence of ecstatically contemplative works, but a predecessor of the trilogy (Harasi'i, Turongo/i/d and the Cinq rechanis) that he has described as "his" Tristan.

Spirituality and transfigured sensuality must be present in any adequate performance of the work, and the Labéque sisters, supervised by the composer in this 13-year-old recording, understand that very well. The most difficult moments of the cycle are, in their performance, among the most convincing: the curious mingling of asceticism, distilled Gounod and showy pianism (lurching at one point very close to boogie-woogie) in the "Amen du désir" itself, for example, and the passage in the joyous, bell-bedecked procession of the final "Amen de la consommation" that is second cousin to the proto-ragtime of Satie's La diva de l'Empire. Their virtuosity is formidable, too, so the driving energy of the "Amen des étoiles" has exhilarating momentum (the orgiastic wildness of Turonga/i/d is most clearly prefigured here) and the "turbulent, smiling mé/ange" of nature-sounds (Messiaen's own description) in the "Amen des anges" is brilliantly light and transparent. These moments have to be earned, though, and the sisters are almost equally impressive in the awe-struck stillness at the end of the "Amen de l'agonie de Jesus" (the painful meditation which, so to speak, allows the "Amen du désir" that follows it) and in the almost oppressively penitential "Amen du jugement", its every phrase nailed down by three harsh chords, verdicts of 'guilty'. With no other version currently available in the UK, this is an important and welcome issue; the recording, which is close and sonorous, makes the utmost of Messiaen's aureoles of clashing overtones. M.E.O.