Fugue State Films has changed the face of organ DVDs, this joining ‘Vierne’s Symphonies’ (6/21) and ‘Bach’s Missing Pages’ (9/23) in setting new standards for presentation of the music.

Long central to the modern repertoire, Messiaen’s organ music is hardly an unknown quantity, and this set rightly places the emphasis on that cultural milieu from which it emerged and on which it is now pervasive. At more than three and a half hours, the eponymous documentary has an expansiveness comparable to that of the composer’s later cycles, but its division into four parts makes relatively assimilable viewing. ‘Acte de foi’ relates the religious dimension that determined Messiaen’s outlook from the outset, while ‘Le vent de l’esprit’ considers how this was directly channelled into music for organ while he was barely into his 20s. ‘Les oiseaux et les sources’ looks at the increasingly integral role of birdsong in Messiaen’s creativity, being applied with scientific rigour as well as metaphysical wonder and bridging that supposed divide between the systematic and the intuitive. Finally, ‘La joie de la grâce’ looks towards a summation of the composer’s spiritual preoccupations as these underpinned the frequently ambitious musical conceptions that came to dominate his last three decades.

Organist Tom Bell and scholar Christopher Dingle are illuminating guides to how Messiaen’s life and work interact, with judicious enhancement by several other interviewees. Various technical aspects are discussed without becoming abstruse or, moreover, divorced from the music in question. Bell can be heard in complete accounts of four seminal works and, though there are recordings of equal or greater insight in what is now a sizeable discography, the scenic context of Blackburn Cathedral organ could not be bettered thanks to Will Fraser’s unobtrusive direction. The booklet contains a succinct introduction to key terms, detailed overview of the works in question and detailed specification for the organ constructed by JW Walker in 1969 then rebuilt by Wood of Huddersfield in the early 2000s.

As an overall package, this is most definitely on a par with previous releases from this source and can be warmly recommended to Messiaen aficionados and, most particularly, those who might have fought shy of exploring what is a defining contribution to organ music as a whole.