Ever since her first recording for Alpha Classics, ‘Crazy Girl Crazy’ back in 2017, Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan has consistently impressed us with the sheer range of her artistry, in music ranging from Haydn to contemporary works, in intimate as well as larger-scale settings, as singer as well as conductor. Her newest disc for the label is devoted to a single composer, Olivier Messiaen, and contains two of his three song-cycles for solo voice, Poèmes pour Mi of 1936–37 and Chants de Terre et de Ciel (1938). Unlike the still later Harawi (1945), these are deeply personal works, the Poèmes dedicated to Messiaen’s first wife, the violinist Claire Delbos (whose affectionate nickname was ‘Mi’), the Chants celebrating the birth of the couple’s son Pascal.

As was Messiaen’s custom, he wrote the texts themselves, and they are suffused with both personal and religious references and imagery, not without a nod to the then-fashionable literary surrealism. This combination of influences makes these cycles both challenging and immensely rewarding, for the performers as well as the listener, and Hannigan’s accompanying booklet note provides insights both into the works themselves and the process by which she came to learn, perform and then record them. In them, she is partnered by Bertrand Chamayou, himself a leading exponent of 20th-century French piano music (his 2015 Erato recording of Ravel’s complete solo piano works is our go-to choice in this repertoire). The Hannigan-Chamayou partnership is not just a meeting of minds, but of temperaments too: between them they conjure up the vast array of timbres, colours and moods so essential to Messiaen’s music.

The disc opens with Chants de Terre et de Ciel, the lesser-known of the two cycles, and from the very opening piano gesture Messiaen’s distinctive soundworld is unmistakable. Although both works were written for a dramatic soprano (Marcelle Bunlet, a noted French Wagnerian), Hannigan’s lighter voice nevertheless has the richness and control of timbre to make the most of this music. There’s a mesmerising stillness to her tone in the first of the Chants’ six songs, ‘Bail avec Mi’, against which the piano’s interjections and chordal support are finely etched. Mysterious meanderings characterise the following ‘Antienne du silence’, while the third song, ‘Danse du bébé-Pilule’, is ebulliently playful. The ‘Rainbow of innocence’ that is the subject of the fourth song is contemplated with rapt delicacy (thanks as much to Hannigan’s enunciation as to her superbly controlled tone). Dark night-terrors stalk the pages of ‘Minuit pile et face’, while the concluding ‘Résurrection’ is suitably transcendent, notwithstanding the abrupt cut-off of its final bar.

The Poèmes pour Mi are probably best known these days in their subsequent orchestrated version, but with Chamayou at the piano there’s a veritable kaleidoscope of colour on display. Here, as in the Chants, it’s Messiaen’s music (as well as the performers themselves) that successfully melds together the various strands in the texts. These songs are more erotically charged than the Chants, and even in the relative stillness of the opening ‘Action de grâces’ Hannigan brings a frisson to the music which is completely captivating. The more animated numbers – ‘La Maison’, ‘Épouvante’ and ‘Les deux guerriers’ – are immaculately rhythmically sprung and thrillingly involving, but it is the hypnotically oscillating chords of the sixth song, ‘Ta voix’, that really haunt the listener. The cycle culminates in the uninhibited ecstasy of the ‘Prière exaucée’, its cascade of concluding piano chords bringing that rare thing in 20th-century music: a boldly affirmative ending.

As a pendant to these two magnificent song cycles, Hannigan and Chamayou are joined by Canadian tenor Charles Sy and Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang in Messiaen’s early ten-minute cantata (or ‘scena’), La Mort du nombre (‘The Death of the Number’, 1930). In it, two souls, one anguished (the tenor), the other placatory (soprano) are gradually reconciled through the intermediary of an ‘âme unique’ (the violin). The work treats some of the ground covered in the cycles, but in an altogether different musical style which owes much to early-20th-century symbolism and French impressionism; the swirls of the piano at the close are redolent of Ravel at his most opulent. Freud would probably have had a field-day with it, but this top-drawer performance raises La Mort du nombre well above the status of a mere mignardise. With a ringing, heroic timbre from Sy, and meltingly sweet playing from Frang, it’s a fascinating glimpse of truly early Messiaen, imaginatively and confidently written but not yet completely his own man. And it caps a disc of myriad delights, superbly recorded, and a credit to all concerned. All lovers of French song should hear it!