Balsom explains in her booklet note that EMI gave her considerable freedom in choosing her programme for the disc and thereby lays my only real reservation. The objective (a daunting one as Balsom readily admits) was to seek out new material although what we get is a slightly uncomfortable blend of one vast original composition in the Eben, that whilst well coupled with the shorter Tomasi work seems rather ill at ease with the likes of Shenandoah and George Thalben-Ball’s well-known organ Elegy. It may be that Balsom was conscious of not duplicating works with Håkan Hardenberger’s release of music for the same combination that appeared on BIS earlier this year (also reviewed by the writer) although in fact it is only the Tomasi that is common to both discs.

Their Warner Classics debut makes clear that Christina & Michelle Naughton show great imagination in their programming: Messiaen's mystical and epic Visions de l'Amen, composed during World War II, appears alongside John Adams' boisterous and percussive Hallelujah Junction, inspired by a truck stop on the border of Nevada and California. The CD is completed with J.S. Bach's serenely moving Gotttes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106, in an arrangement by the contemporary Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag.

Since the end of the seventeenth century French composers have shown a particular skill and deftness of touch in writing for the flute. The instrument owes much of its prominence in French music of the twentieth century to the use made of it in orchestral colouring by composers such as Debussy and Ravel, as well as to a group of highly gifted players associated in one way or another with the Paris Conservatoire. They include the soloist on this recording, Patrick Gallois, a pupil of Jean-Pierre Rampal. This collection of works composed during the last sixty years ranges from Poulenc’s Sonata, marked by rhythmic vitality and a delicate vein of sentimentality, Messiaen’s Le merle noir, inspired by bird song, to Boulez’s Sonatine, which the composer himself has characterised as ‘organised delirium’.

Grammy® Award-winner Gloria Cheng brings an exquisite array of touch to this programme which couples the first mature works of Olivier Messiaen with the darkly radiant music of Kaija Saariaho. The Calder Quartet joins Ms. Cheng for Saariaho's 2003 trio 'Je sens un deuxième coeur' and Messiaen's 'Pièce pour piano et quatuor à cordes'. Saariaho attended this first recording of her ‘Ballade’ and ‘Prelude’.

Alberto Rosado showcases some of the most significant modern composers in this well-considered programme. Inevitably he’s up against fierce competition, not least Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s recordings of both Ligeti’s Ricercata (included on the disc which received Gramophone’s Contemporary Award in 1997) and the complete Vingt Regards.

This fabulous five disc set is replete with some of those old Stokowski warhorses all recorded in absolutely mind boggling Phase 4 sound, overblown perhaps but astounding for its time. Decca's remastering is absolutely magnificent and the discs are jam packed with almost six hours of music. This is another fine memorial to a great conductor who remained astonishingly vital until the very end of his life.

The seeds for Messiaen's final organ work were sown during an inspirational trip to Israel in 1984. Over the course of the next twelve months, Messiaen found improvisation leading him back to composition after the exhausting labours that had produced his mighty opera Saint François d'Assise.The Livre du Saint Sacrement became Messiaen's grand farewell to his own instrument, and Michael Bonaventure performs it from memory here on the Rieger organ at St Giles' Cathedral, the true acoustic of which preserves the clarity of Messiaen's lines.

Released between 1991 and 2005, the selections in The Warner Recordings encapsulate the period when Pierre-Laurent Aimard was signed to Erato and Teldec, performing mostly 20th-century fare and some music from the 19th century. Aimard is famous for his contributions to the modernist catalog, and his performances of works by Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, György Ligeti, and Olivier Messiaen are regarded as scrupulously executed and authoritatively interpreted. Aimard also recorded early 20th century pieces by Charles Ives, Alban Berg, Maurice Ravel, and Claude Debussy, as well as Romantic masterpieces of Beethoven and Liszt. A pianist's pianist, Aimard is well-rounded in his repertoire and a true master of keyboard technique, yet he has received considerably less fanfare than many of his flashier colleagues. Yet connoisseurs of piano recordings know that Aimard is indispensible, especially for his special feeling for French music, and his recordings are important documents that serious students and newcomers should appreciate.

A solitaire in French is a single mounted jewel, a concept that seems less than apt for the rather hefty works recorded here by British pianist Kathryn Stott. But this fine recital holds together in another way: Ravel, who so often provides the temporal endpoint for traditional piano recitals, is here, to a greater or lesser extent, the launching point for the other three composers featured. Stott's reading of the neoclassical Le Tombeau de Couperin is beautifully precise and balanced, catching the economy of this Baroque-style suite to the hilt. That economy carries over into the later works, even the rarely performed Piano Sonata of Henri Dutilleux, a work that deftly fuses Ravel's sense of classical forms with a largely dissonant language. The opening Prelude and Fugue of Jehan Alain, actually two separate works that are reasonably enough combined here, is another seldom-played piece that makes an arresting curtain-raiser, and the final "Le baiser de l'Enfant Jésus" of Messiaen, part of the giant Vingt regards sur l'Enfant Jésus, is the splendid climax of the whole, its spiritual, dreamlike ascent at the end superbly controlled. Better still is the sound, recorded at Hallé St. Peters in Manchester: it creates a hypnotic effect all its own.

Along with Wit's Naxos recording, this is one of the best versions of Messiaen's phantasmagoric Turangalîla-Symphonie available, and it's very different: swifter, more obviously virtuosic in concept, perhaps a touch less warm in consequence, and engineered with greater “in your face” immediacy. The playing of the Concertgebouw, always a wonderful Messiaen orchestra, is stunning throughout. Chailly revels in the music's weirdness. The Ondes Martinot, for example, is particularly well captured. It's interesting how earlier performances tended to minimize its presence, perhaps for fear that is would sound silly, which of course it does, redeemed by the composer's utter seriousness and obliviousness to anything that smacks of humor. In any case, it's not all noise and bluster. The Garden of Love's Sleep is gorgeous, hypnotic, but happily still flowing, while the three Turangalîla rhythmic studies have remarkable clarity. Jean-Yves Thibaudet plays the solo piano part magnificently, really as well as anyone else ever has.