Deutsche Grammophon New CD F 477 7452 ( DDD)

As Messiaen year draws to a close, one figure has emerged above all others as the great champion of this composer. Pierre-Laurent Aimard has spent much of his year playing the music, he has curated an entire festival devoted to Messiaen at London’s Southbank Centre and now, to crown these achievements, comes this disc.

It’s a survey of Messiaen’s output that feels rather like a curated festival in itself: Aimard’s loving, guiding hand is evident not just on the keyboard. He has written an excellent and carefully considered booklet-note and the selection of musical works is clearly far from random. The Préludes reveal the young, raw Messiaen reeling from his mother’s death, pieces from the Catalogue d’oiseaux catch his fascination with birdsong and the paired Ile de feu studies find the composer exploring primitive, primal emotions (he was, Aimard reminds us, much taken at the time with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring).

If these are pictures at an exhibition, then, the presentation is bold but far from garish. Nowhere does this master pianist surrender to cacophony or chaos. Everything is musical, all has a through-line of thought that makes sense even of the seemingly random birdsongs. Messiaen may have tried to replicate the vagaries of nature, he seems to be saying, but even nature has a plan.