Collins Classics field an all-star team for this performance of Messiaen's extraordinary quartet, a team which manages to outdo all its rivals in tonal warmth and intensity of feeling. Christopher van Kampen is supreme, and significantly slower than anyone else, in the fifth movement's ecstatically sweet hymn, and he makes even Tashi's Fred Sherry seem relatively mundane in the seventh movement's dreamlike chant. Both van Kampen and Madeleine Mitchell are helped by a recording of almost extravagant depth and range—never has the second section of the second movement sounded so unartificially distant—and Mitchell leads the work to its sumptuously ethereal apotheosis with a winning blend of poise and fervour. The competition is left sounding almost dull by comparison.
The advantages of modern recording are especially evident in the first movement. Whereas Tashi's Peter Serkin appears to over-articulate Messiaen's 'powdery' dusting of harmonic resonance, Joanna MacGregor achieves a veiled smoothness which is at the opposite extreme from the 'granitic' vehemence she delivers elsewhere. In these passages, MacGregor's Steinway threatens to shatter my speakers, but the impact is never inappropriately over-the-top in this least churchy of religious compositions.
There is a considerable difference between David Campbell's trumpet-like clarinet, less than ideally volatile in the third movement's flights of birdsong, and the woodier fluency of Tashi's Richard Stoltzman, but Campbell's sound fits in well with the overriding, even overwhelming emotional force of this new account. I still just prefer Tashi over the Teldec group as the leading alternative: the latter may please listeners seeking a less vibrantly dramatic reading, and the former's 1975 sound inevitably seems more dated by the year, despite digital remastering.
Collins add a work for the same combination as the Messiaen by the Polish-born composer Zygmunt Krauze (b. 1938). Written to mark the birth of his son in 1985, it is rather protracted and rather characterless, at least in this company. Krauze is not the only composer of his generation to have become stranded between the increasing promptings of nostalgia and the modern propensity for tough talking. The piece has its moments—an edgily serene ending, for example—but it still seems longer than its actual 17'44''.'