Messiaen: Complete Bird Music For Piano Solo
by Carl-Axel Dominique

From MadhattanJack 02/12/2026 00:56 | #313107

Olivier Messiaen was unusual, even for a 20th century composer, in that he was both a music theorist and an ornithologist. He made several compositions purporting to be transcriptions of birdsong recordings into music, mostly for piano and flute; this album contains most of his birdsong-based piano works from the mid-1950s onward, as performed by Swedish pianist Carl-Axel Dominique — who in turn is actually better-known as the husband of another Swedish (mostly jazz) musician, Monica Dominique. (No relation to NBA player Dominique Wilkins, at least not that we know of.) The recording itself, which runs to roughly 3-1/2 hours in total, is un-effected with microphones placed at a medium distance, so that it sounds more like a 1960s/1970s-era recording than a 1990s-era one (which was probably intentional). All in all, this is almost certainly the finest exemplar of ornithologically-based neo-classical piano music ever produced.