These six little piano pieces were written at the request of Messiaen¹s wife, who wanted a musical depiction of a robin. The six pieces are, for the most part, lightly textured and slow, though there are moments of extremely agitated, virtuosic writing. As a whole, Petites esquisses d¹oiseaux is deceptively and superficially simple, masking what Peter Hill has described as a ³subtle, intricate elegance which at times is coolly understated.²

Of the six pieces, or portraits, numbers one, three, and five represent the robin, whose music is the most moderate and gentle. Interspersed with the robin are blackbirds, song thrushes, and the skylark, whose intense and furious music concludes the work. Using a relatively minimal amount of musical material, including floating chords over a pedal and a pervasive descending arpeggio figure for the robin, Messiaen is able to create a capricious, ³acrobatic² work. Its technical difficultly, and indeed the difficulty of most of his piano work—for which Messiaen was known to have been apologetic—is due to his familiarity with the pianistic skill of his wife, Yvonne Loriod.

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