Messiaen: La Fauvette Passerinette: a premiere, with birds, landscapes & homages - Peter Hill, piano

In 2012, leading pianist and Messiaen scholar Peter Hill made a remarkable discovery among the composer’s papers: several pages of tightly written manuscript from 1961, constituting a near-complete and hitherto unknown work for piano.

Hill was able to fill in some missing dynamics and articulations by consulting Messiaen’s birdsong notebooks, and gave the work’s first public performance in the autumn of 2013.<br> Here, then, he follows his acclaimed Bach recordings for Delphian with a return to the music in which he first made his reputation, setting this glittering addition to Messiaen’s piano output in the context both of the composer’s own earlier work and of music by the many younger composers on whom Messiaen was a profound influence – from Stockhausen and Takemitsu to George Benjamin, who like Hill himself worked closely with the composer in the years before his death.

Hill places the new work within an exceptionally well-crafted recital in which Messiaen's music is a recurrent thread in a span of resonances, influences and affinities...Whether in Dutilleux or Peter Sculthorpe, Murail or Takemitsu, Hill's provides a masterclass in capturing a composer's idiom with warmth and humanity. --BBC Music Magazine