Barbara Hannigan defies expectations regularly, making her performance Monday night at the Library of Congress a must-hear event. At the end of a highly praised North American tour, the Canadian-born soprano joined pianist Bertrand Chamayou to deliver a powerhouse punch of music from three visionary composers. Colored lighting on the Coolidge Auditorium’s stage hinted at the synesthetic tendencies of two of them.

Hannigan, a multi-faceted singer and conductor with a reputation as the high priestess of contemporary music, strode onto the stage to a long ovation before she even sang a note. She proceeded to give an intense rendition of Olivier Messiaen’s 1938 song cycle Chants de terre et de ciel, a celebration of the composer’s wife, Claire Delbos, and the birth of their son Pascal.

The soprano floated high notes in the first song, “Bail avec Mi,” with ethereal light and straight tone, a slight tipping to sharpness perhaps a sign of vocal strain at the end of the tour. Messiaen, who often approached the piano with the mind of an organist, notated much of the cycle’s keyboard part on three staves, which Chamayou realized with astounding virtuosity, even at the often brisk, ecstatic tempos taken by Hannigan, as in the chant-like “Antienne du silence.”

The two middle songs, playful portraits of the joyful baby, are almost embarrassingly earthy, with much of the text (all words by the composer) given over to nonsensical baby talk. Hannigan, after singing the opening maternal songs swaying and with closed eyes, gyrated in place in “Danse du bébé-pilule.” Both she and Chamayou made the most of upward-rising scalar motifs in “Arc-en-ciel d’innocence,” in which the words refer to playfully lifting the baby up high.

Hannigan reached a mystical apogee in the last two songs, an evocation of both the composer’s sins and the ecstatic salvation offered by Christ’s resurrection. In “Minuit pile et face,” Chamayou’s powerful, piercing tone provided the rhythmic music depicting the composer’s dancing sins. The music morphed in startling ways into the sufferings of hell, with tritones predominating in the vocal line. Chamayou’s right hand tolled bell strokes, counted to twelve in the text, following a howled prayer for deliverance.

Hair-raising volume from both singer and pianist marked the final song, with more enraptured Alleluias leading to the words of Christ from the Easter Sunday introit (“Je suis resuscité”). (Gone was the more polite sense of Catholic mysticism, heard in Yvonne Loriod’s classic recording of the piece with Maria Oràn.) As Hannigan reached the concluding A-sharps of the final phrase, the sense of Christ soaring to heaven like a rocket came across viscerally.

To provide his singer some respite, Chamayou offered two piano pieces by Scriabin, from the years before the composer’s untimely death, as examples of a different brand of mysticism. Chamayou’s tendency toward sharp-fingered delineation of voices did not suit the murky textures of the Poème-nocturne, but he rendered the expanding musical conflagration of Vers la flamme with consummate force, evoking the destruction of the world in flames.

By far the strangest effect of the evening came in John Zorn’s song cycle Jumalattaret, composed in 2012, partly on Finnish texts from the Kalevala. Although it was not composed for her, Hannigan has tamed the work’s crushing demands, as heard in her live recording of the piece. In the framing introduction and postlude, she recited the longest passages of actual words like incantations. She then turned in many songs to pure vocalise, hums, growls, shrieks, yodels, and other unclassifiable sounds, at insane extremes of range and color.

At the keyboard, Chamayou often sounded meditative ostinatos, although at times he and Hannigan traded berserk fits of rapid notes as if voice and piano were from the same instrumental family. In some songs, Hannigan turned toward the piano, directing her sound into the strings, which sometimes resonated sympathetically in ghostly echoes. Chamayou matched Hannigan’s otherworldly sound world by striking, plucking, and hammering the strings directly.

Ear-taxing passages of violent attacks and dissonant clashes alternated with soothing interludes, at one point like a softly repeating lullaby. As she had done with Messiaen’s Catholic visions, Hannigan dug into the piece with utter devotion, her statuesque stage presence and vocal power combining to evoke a sort of litany to nine Finnish goddesses. If it did not exactly make logical sense, the performance reached into some instinctual part of the listener’s brain, activating a dream world one could imagine only as long as the music lasted.

The Pacifica Quartet presents an all-American program for the annual Stradivari anniversary concert 8 p.m. December 18 and 19. loc.gov

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