Messiaen: La Fauvette Passerinette

   in Piano International (Mar, 2015)
Peter Hill returns to the music for which he’s best known. He collaborated with Messiaen during 1986-91, when recording the complete piano works. But in 2012, he discovered among the composer’s papers an almost- complete, previously unknown piano piece from 1961, La Fauvette Passerinette (Subalpine Warbler). Hill added missing dynamics on the basis of Messiaen’s birdsong notebooks; this recording places the piece with others by the composer, and by those he influenced, including Stockhausen, Takemitsu, Murail and George Benjamin.

The programme includes Le traquet stapazin from Catalogue d’oiseaux from 1956-8, and we hear how its French Impressionist elements have disappeared in the more austere soundworld of La Fauvette Passerinette …