Although a Bicentennial commission and premiered in New York, Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles … (1971 74) has only latterly been taken up by American ensembles. This Seattle account follows on from that recorded in Utah and is hardly less convincing an interpretation.

Ludovic Morlot enjoyed a successful tenure as music director of the Seattle Symphony (he is now the orchestra’s conductor emeritus) and his rapport with these players is evident from a suspenseful take on ‘The Desert’, opening a first part that includes the intricate interplay of ‘What is Written in the Stars’ before culminating with the vertiginous expressive contrasts of ‘Cedar Breaks and the Gift of Awe’. Concluding the second part, ‘Bryce Canyon and the Red Orange Rocks’ is the work’s formal and emotional fulcrum in every respect, while not such as to pre-empt the sensuous languor of ‘The Resurrected and the Song of the Star Aldebaran’. This launches a third part that features the teasing pathos of ‘The Wood Thrush’, and whose climax is that ecstatic amalgam of birdsong with chorale in ‘Zion Park and the Celestial City’.

As to soloists, Steven Osborne outshines pretty much all his rivals, not least in the ricocheting gestures of ‘The White-Browed Robin’ and judiciously applied rhetoric of ‘The Mockingbird’, while his cadenzas elsewhere can hardly be faulted for their subtlety or precision. Jeffery Fair brings formidable virtuosity to bear on ‘Interstellar Call’, which still seems marginally less evocative than other horn players have rendered it, while Matthew Decker and Michael A Werner leave nothing to chance through their respective contributions for glockenspiel and xylorimba.

Its sound a model of focus and lucidity, with informative notes from Paul Schiavo, this latest version can be confidently recommended for admirers and newcomers alike, but those who already have the Hyperion account or those predecessors listed need not feel short-changed. The performances from which this release is taken were accompanied with video projections of those national parks and monuments that provided inspiration, yet Messiaen’s music is in itself an inclusive audiovisual experience and needs little if any ‘enhancement’ to convey its essence – not least in a recording that is as perceptive and involving as this.