The composer coming into view on the anniversary carousel that our classical-music life so often resembles is Olivier Messiaen, who was born a century ago and died in 1992. There will be a lot of his music around this year, and not just in this country, but the Southbank Centre claims to have devised the most ambitious Messiaen celebration anywhere. From the Canyons to the Stars runs, indeed, for the whole year, beginning (a few days ago) and ending (in December) with a concert by the Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain, the later one to be conducted by Messiaen’s most famous pupil, Pierre Boulez. In between are nearly 50 concerts and symposiums, concentrated in this month and October, taking place in a variety of London halls and churches, embracing most of Messiaen’s canon (all his organ music), and including works by pupils such as George Benjamin and Gérard Grisey, as well as Boulez.

The vast, solitary opera, Saint François d’Assise, is not being attempted, but many of the grand, concert-length statements figure: the piano cycle Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus, given by the artistic director Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the QEH on Wednesday; the cantata La transfiguration de notre seigneur Jésus-Christ, undertaken by the Philarmonia Orchestra under Kent Nagano in October; and in the first week, both the Turangalîla-symphonie, played by the Philharmonia under Esa-Pekka Salonen (I hope to discuss this next Sunday), and the 12-movement, 100-minute evocation of the Utah and Arizona deserts, and their bird life, Des canyons aux étoiles (1974), which provides the festival’s title and was its opening “fanfare”, brilliantly sounded by the Parisians under their young Finnish music director, Susanna Malkki.

Gigantism is one of Messiaen’s most obvious creative characteristics, along with his continuous expression of Catholic faith, his sacramental but exacting use of birdsong, his importation of Hindu rhythm, and his concept of structure as a ritualist, static montage. All his music is a homage, even at an antihumanist pitch of intensity, to God. Huge scale and sonority reflect, for Messiaen, God’s grandeur. Sam Goldwyn’s advice to film directors – “Begin with an earthquake, then rise to a climax” – was a natural way to proceed for the composer, though Des canyons aux étoiles actually starts with delicate, “empty desert” sounds, such as the shimmering harmonics produced by bowing crotales (Chinese cymbals). There are tremendous tuttis later, but the groups of instruments, headed by obbligato piano, xylophone, glockenspiel and horn, never coalesce, and keep their spiky identity amid the most apocalyptic climaxes.

It is, like so much Messiaen, music of clear, hard outline and utter certainty of gesture and idiom. Even when he writes lush, throbbing, quasi-sentimental passages for strings, the parts retain a fiercely etched quality, unmistakable in this superbly focused account. Malkki’s calm, incisive direction drew effortless, biting virtuosity from the players, each effectively a soloist. The whizzing figuration generated by the xylophonist, Sam-uel Favre, and the glockenspiel player, Michel Cerutti, positioned at the front of the stage with the pianist, was fascinating – ear-tickling – to follow, particularly when caught in midair by the piccolo and twisted into counterpoint.

The horn soloist, Jean-Christophe Vervoitte, played the movement, Interstellar Call, that he has to himself with cool aplomb, and the three horns in unison launched the penultimate movement, Omao, Leiothrix, Elepaio, Shama (a magical spell of a title), with a memorable, blasting sinuous-ness. Wind machine, thunder sheet, whip and the specially invented geo-phone (a large, disc-like container, tilted to make the sound of dry, shifting earth) are put to pictorial effect with an unabashed naivety typical of the composer, and were duly arresting. The work is virtually a wind-machine concerto, but is a real one for piano, which keeps up an incessant twitter of birdsong and has two movements to itself. Aimard was the hugely experienced soloist, though not even he could disguise a certain crazed relentless-ness to Messiaen’s approach. Just as in nature, Messiaen’s birds go on singing as they listeth, oblivious to the human ear. Des canyons aux étoiles is a spectacular and monumental achievement, but barely concerned with human values.

From the South Bank, the festival moved to its other base, the Royal Academy of Music, where I attended a brief recital for piano and piano duo. Yurie Miura, a junior fellow of the college, played two movements – La Bouscarle (Cetti’s warbler) and Le Courlis cendré (curlew) – from Messiaen’s seven volumes of birdsong transcription, Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956-58), another monument. It was interesting to realise anew how much the gestural abruptness and dissonant harmony of these pieces have influenced avant-garde composers with no ornithological pretensions at all, and the performances were excellent, but one can have enough of birdsong. The earlier, much more yielding Visions de l’amen (1943), for two pianos, performed with vigour and authority by the RAM students Bing Bing Li and Mariangela Vacatello, was a refreshing contrast, and a torrent of inventiveness. Religious ardour here acquires an almost witty dimension: the multilayered textures have a teasing iridescence, and for no apparent reason, one player will drop out for a while. The final Amen de la consomma-tion is a riot of church bells.

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