When John Ogdon and Brenda Lucas’ 1970 recording of Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen first came out, the only viable catalog competition came from the teenage Labeque sisters, not to mention the hard-to-find 1962 traversal with Messiaen and his wife Yvonne Loriod. Although Ogdon and Lucas proved superior to the Labeques for sheer pianism, they allowed more than a few rhythmic inaccuracies to pass, along with long patches of enervated, lackluster playing (especially in the fourth and seventh movements). Furthermore, the pianists were ill-served by brittle, monochromatic, and dynamically constricted engineering. Imagine a spacious, colorful landscape reproduced in black and white and scaled down to the size of a postcard: that’s not what this music needs! It needs color, resonance, the widest dynamic range possible, plus suppler hands at both keyboards.
The aforementioned Messiaen/Loriod is not easy to find on CD, but it’s far better recorded and infinitely more intense and emotionally varied from an interpretive standpoint. The same can be said for the reference Osborne/Roscoe recording on Hyperion, while a most impressive version from Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher on Col Legno is well worth investigating. As for further mining of Argo’s back catalogue, may I suggest that Explore resurrect the late composer/pianist Robert Sherlaw Johnson’s Messiaen recordings?
