CD CHOICE: OLIVIER MESSIAEN COMPLETE EDITIONVarious performers Deutsche Grammophon 480 1333 (32 CDs) *****

Olivier Messiaen was many things - mystical Catholic and dutiful church organist, bird-lover extraordinaire, student of Indian rhythmic practices - and he blended all of his interests in his musical output. He was also an inspirational teacher, a compositional innovator who laid the grounds for the avant-garde serialism of the 1950s, and a man full of surprises. Witness his sole, lusciously scored late opera, Saint Françoise d'Assise, a subject very dear to him.

Messiaen's music is highly sensual, visionary, devotional, pictorial, uncompromising. In the 1940s he wrote a trilogy of works (the Turangalîla-Symphonie, the song cycle Harawiand Cinqrechants for 12 voices), which, inspired by the Tristan and Isolde myth, explore the extremes of love. More successfully than anyone else he embraced the ethereal, scooping sounds of the 1920s electronic instrument, the ondes Martenot, including it in a number of orchestral works and even writing for ondes Martenot sextet.

He wrote copiously for his own instruments, the piano (his largest cycle is a Catalogue d'oiseaux), and the organ. The piano features in the Quartet for the End of Time, which he wrote as a prisoner of war in Silesia, where the opera was famously premièred.

The centenary of Messiaen's birth has prompted numerous anniversary sets. The most complete comes from Deutsche Grammophon, which has the only complete recording of the four-hour opera. The set features many composer-sanctioned recordings, with orchestral honours shared by Pierre Boulez and Myung-Whun Chung, Roger Muraro for the piano music, and Olivier Latry the organ music. The composer's widow, pianist Yvonne Loriod, also features, and she's joined by her husband in a 1962 recording of the Visions de l'Amenfor two pianos.

In the fullest, oldest sense of the word, this is an awesome achievement. www.tinyurl.com/5b9s4r

MICHAEL DERVAN