No 20th-century composition rises more determinedly above earthly trials and tribulations than the quartet for violin, cello, clarinet and piano that Olivier Messiaen completed and performed in his wartime prison camp (Stalag VIII A, near Görlitz in Lower Silesia) in January 1941. On the whole, early recordings did not aspire to evoke those grim conditions, but in 2024 it is difficult not to hear the raw, even primitive immediacy maintained by Het Collectief as seeking to acknowledge how hectically approximate that first performance must have been. Their interpretation and the close-focused recording, featuring an overtone-rich, almost trumpet-like clarinet, are ideal for the episodes dominated by birdsong and dancelike music. The contrasting movements emphasising mystical contemplation, and especially the sublime finale for violin and piano, are less fulsomely emotional than in many other recordings but, given the character of the performance as a whole, this relatively restrained aesthetic, with its sparing use of intense vibrato, is perfectly appropriate.

A similar spirit might be expected of Tristan Murail’s Stalag VIIIa, his 2018 prelude to Messiaen’s Quartet, with its initial instruction – ‘icy, sombre’ – saying as much about the weather at that premiere as the music itself. Overall, however, both compositions counter their moments of darkness and depression with the ecstatic exuberance that grows most naturally from the composer’s rich harmonic palette, imbued as it is with enhanced consonances and melodic flourishes hymning the glories of earthly nature as well as of heaven.

Not having heard the Quartet for some time, I was struck anew by its extraordinary originality, and the unselfconscious spontaneity with which Messiaen switches between spiritual and sensual, until they become – almost – indistinguishable. Not for nothing were the very different musics of Tristan and Pelléas both deeply revered by him, and the distance that Messiaen retains here between the Catholic rituals so explicit in his organ music and a frank secularity (not excluding hints of the music hall) helps to explain why some of his pupils shuddered at their master’s apparent naivety.

More than 30 years after Messiaen’s death, his music has endured to an extent which, by and large, that of his pupils has not, showing how vital the links he retained with pre-modernist traditions always were. These links have continued to nourish many different kinds of new music, as Murail’s later compositions, including Stalag VIIIa, confirm. The musicians making up Het Collectief are clearly well practised in this extensive modernist diversity, and so are able to infuse vibrant new life into a score that cries out for such wholehearted progressiveness.