Recommendations for Messiaen's "Quatuor Pour La Fin Du Temps"

[Musicophile]

Greetings,

 

Looking for recommendations for recordings of Olivier Messiaen's "Quatuor Pour La Fin Du Temps", either CD or download. I've listened to a few on MOG and Spotify, but really haven't sorted out preferences yet. Any explanation for your recommendation would be appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Christopher

 

I'm personally only an occasional listener to Messiaen (my musical taste is rather conservative, and I have very little tolerance for atonal stuff usually). However, this piece is really somehow special.

 

I discovered it on Swiss public radio on a very nice show they do once a week, where they take 2 experts/musicians in the studio and let them compare blindly movement by movement 5 different versions of a classical piece. In this case they had the first violin of the Basel Chamber orchestra and the pianist of the Animae piano trio.

 

I'm not always fully aligned with what these experts chose (e.g. my favorite Bach Cello Suites from Isserlis got kicked out in the first round recently), but with Messien I could fully support their recommendations.

 

They have two recordings that came out on top:

 

1) Lars Vogt; Isabelle van Keulen; Alban Gerhardt; Michael Collins. This is an EMI live recording, and is also my favorite, there is a special energy in the live recording.

 

Amazon.com: Spannungen: Heimbach Festival 2000: Spannungen-Heimbach Festival 1999: Music

 

2) Myung-Whun Chung; Gil Shaham; Jian Wang; Paul Meyer. A more polished recording, but also really impressive.

 

Amazon.com: Quartet for the End of Time: Music