Boulez has spoken of his pleasure at performing Messiaen with an orchestra relatively unfamiliar with his music. It sounds as though the Cleveland Orchestra must have enjoyed it too. You would expect them to, perhaps, in such a passage as that in the fourth movement of Et exspecto, where the two superimposed plainchant melodies return together with the noble 'theme of the depths' – it has great splendour, as does the chorale melody of the finale, rising at the end to a satisfyingly palpable fffff. And in this performance of Chronochromie you can hear why Messiaen said that certain pages of it were a double homage to Berlioz and Pierre Schaeffer, the French pioneer of electronic music. In the work's penultimate section, the famous 'Epode' in which 18 string players impersonate different birds, the obvious problems of clarity and precistion are expertly negotiated: the players really seem to enjoy their dawn chorus.
Absoluterhythmic precision and the clarity of colour that comes from meticulous balance are among the other pleasures of these performances.
They make a most satisfying coupling, too. The recordings are excellent: clean but not clinical and ample in range.