Some recordings feel less like documents than like atmospheres you can step back into — and the Melos Ensemble’s early-1960s LP of French chamber music centered on the harp is exactly that kind of record. It has been circulating among collectors for decades, passed between friends the way certain wines are, with the same hushed reverence. Now reissued by Alto, it deserves to be heard again, and heard carefully.
Start with Ravel. The Introduction and Allegro for harp, flute, clarinet, and string quartet is one of those pieces that arrived fully formed — Ravel wrote it in a week in 1905, partly as a demonstration piece for the new Érard chromatic harp against the rival Pleyel double-action instrument, and partly, one suspects, because the combination of timbres simply delighted him. It’s music that shimmers. Osian Ellis plays it with a fullness of tone — a kind of lipped, resonant fruitfulness in the lower strings of the instrument — that you don’t often hear. Most harpists play this piece prettily. Ellis plays it as if the harp were capable of warmth in the way a cello is, and the effect is extraordinary. The Melos players around him — Richard Adeney’s flute threading through the texture like smoke, Gervase de Peyer’s clarinet finding its own smoky shadows — complete the picture with a naturalness that sounds effortless and is anything but.
Ellis was principal harpist of the LSO for many years, and composers lined up to write for him: Alwyn’s Lyra Angelica, Hoddinott’s concerto, Mathias’s, Holloway’s. That catalogue of commissions tells you something. There are harpists who play the notes and harpists who play the instrument. Ellis played the instrument.
The Debussy Sonata for flute, viola, and harp is a subtler proposition — three movements of late-career compression, written in 1915 when the composer was already ill, already shadowed by the war, already simplifying toward something essential. It is a piece full of distances: the three instruments seem to regard one another from across a room, touching and then withdrawing. Cecil Aronowitz’s viola brings exactly the right quality of melancholy to the slow movement, and the finale — quicksilver, almost evasive — lands with a sense of irreversible departure. This is not the most overtly emotional reading you’ll find; it is something better, something truer to the music’s equivocal nature.
Roussel’s Sérénade, op. 30, tends to get lost in this company, which is unfair. The style is deliberately drier — a little angular, a little astringent — and Roussel, who spent years studying with d’Indy and had been a naval officer before music claimed him entirely, was never interested in Impressionist softness for its own sake. The piece has real backbone. The Melos players find its wit without losing its delicacy, which is harder than it sounds.
The Ropartz is the rarest item here. Guy Ropartz spent most of his career in provincial France — Nancy, then Strasbourg — absorbing the Breton landscapes that saturated his imagination, and the Prélude, Marine et Chansons has that quality of coastal light and salt air that belongs to a particular tradition of French regionalism, adjacent to but distinct from the Parisian mainstream. For years it was the only piece by which most collectors knew him at all, and it remains atmospheric in ways that are hard to pin down — a lush, rolling music with something genuinely wild underneath.
The Boieldieu Harp Concerto is a different matter entirely — a different world, really. Boieldieu died in 1834, and his concerto belongs to an elegant, pre-Romantic sensibility: all clarity, proportion, graceful ornament. Here Marie-Claire Jamet steps in as soloist, with Paul Kuentz conducting his Paris chamber orchestra. The sound picture shifts accordingly — more orchestral, more distant, Jamet’s tone silvery and slender where Ellis is warm and full. It’s a bit like moving from a drawing room to a concert hall. The music itself is charming without being trivial, Mozartian in its poise if not quite in its depth, and Jamet plays it with appropriate lightness of touch.
The Melos Ensemble was not a random collection of freelancers — de Peyer, Adeney, Aronowitz, cellist Terence Weil, and the others were principals and soloists of the first rank, and they played together with the coherence of a group that had actually rehearsed, actually listened to one another, actually cared. That sounds like a low bar. It isn’t. The transfer on this Alto release is close and full-bodied, perhaps slightly lapel-grabbing in the treble at moments, but the music comes through intact.
If you don’t know this disc, here is your chance to understand why it has lasted. If you do know it, you already know what I’m going to say.
