Pianist Ciro Longobardi has recorded all of Olivier Messiaen's piano works; in January, Brilliant Classics will release them for the first time as a complete edition in a 7-CD set.

The piano music of Messiaen spans times and idioms ranging from the Debussyan Préludes of 1928-9, written when the composer was barely out of his teens, through to the jewel-like Petites Esquisses d’Oiseaux, from 1985 and one of his last works before his death in 1992. While every bar of the music is distinctively and instantly ‘Messiaen’, that idiom evolved a good deal over the years, and came to a kind of peak as well as a crisis in the Catalogue d’Oiseaux from the late 1950s. This 13-movement cycle is the only one of Messiaen’s major works to end in darkness and despair, with the lonely song of the warbler piercing a pitch-black Brittany seascape.

Messiaen could ‘paint’ such pictures in sound as vividly as a Debussy or a Richard Strauss before him, but he could also lift his gaze towards a heaven which was as real for him as the earth below. Hence both the all-encompassing power and tender sincerity of the Vingt Regards, composed during the depths of the Second World War, which retains enduring popularity even among musicians and audiences who are challenged either by musical complexity or by direct appeal to the emotions.

The present release is the fruit of years of living with this music, as well as of the years spent recording it. Ciro Longobardi has performed Messiaen in recital and at festivals across Europe, throughout a career spanning three decades which began with his prize-winning appearance at the International Gaudeamus Competition in Rotterdam in 1994. This important Messiaen set is accompanied by his own reflections on the music, as well as the composer’s own programme notes.

Review pizzicato from Jan. 5, 2026