Harmonica and Strings – Gianluca Littera

There is something faintly absurd, on paper, about the harmonica sidling up to a string quartet and asking to join the conversation. The instrument carries the perfume of subway platforms and Sonny Terry, not the rosined discipline of the Amadeus or the Budapest. And yet English composers of a certain vintage fell hard for it, mostly because of one man: Larry Adler, who spent half a century browbeating serious composers into writing him real music instead of novelty encores. Vaughan Williams gave him a Romance. Malcolm Arnold gave him a concerto. Gordon Jacob, ever the professional’s professional, gave him this Divertimento in 1956. It’s a small delight, unpretentious in the way only a thoroughly accomplished craftsman can afford to be unpretentious.

Jacob taught at the Royal College of Music for what felt like geological ages — Malcolm Arnold and Imogen Holst both passed through his classroom — and his facility shows in every bar of these eight compact movements. Nothing overstays its welcome. The opening March struts in with a wink, all pert dotted rhythms, and by the time the closing movement arrives, sparkling and quick-witted, you feel you’ve been taken on a very English country walk with occasional detours into the exotic. The Siciliano, threaded with plucked strings, has a nocturnal hush to it — pizzicato used not as decoration but as shadow. The Sarabande breathes with unhurried lyric warmth, the kind Jacob could produce in his sleep and often, one suspects, nearly did.

Tommy Reilly set down a benchmark disc of this piece for Chandos years ago, all silvery legato and Old World poise. Gianluca Littera plays it rougher round the edges, more jazz-inflected in his phrasing, and I confess I missed some of Reilly’s honeyed evenness in the Romance. The strings here — the Quartetto Energie Nove, an Italian ensemble new to me — offer up their rich blanket of tone with unfussy warmth, but Littera’s vibrato occasionally wobbles where Reilly’s simply glowed.

James Moody’s Quintet, dating from 1972, is the more substantial discovery here, and the more interesting animal altogether. Moody — not to be confused with the American saxophonist of the same name, a point of endless footnote confusion — wrote film scores and light orchestral music for decades in England, and he came to this piece at Reilly’s own urging. You can hear the harmonica virtuoso’s fingerprints on the finale, a theme-and-variations that keeps refracting its material — dark then luminous, whimsical then austere — with a structural rigor that suggests Moody had done his homework on Elgar’s Enigma Variations, if distantly. The second movement’s Ravel-tinted pizzicati and guitar-like string writing give the whole thing an unexpected Iberian tang, harmonica standing in almost for a plaintive cante jondo voice.

But the slow movement is the reason to own this disc. Marked Lento, it opens prayerfully — spare, almost liturgical — before opening out into something lusher, more Delius than devotional. Littera plays it with real breath control, phrases arching and falling like something sung rather than blown. This is chromatic harmonica writing of real sophistication, miles from Adler’s parlor charm, and it deserves better circulation than it’s had.

Tony Kinsey’s Reflections closes the program, and here the disc’s premise pays its most curious dividend. Kinsey drummed behind Ronnie Scott and half of postwar British jazz, a name you’d expect on a Blue Note sleeve, not a chamber music liner note — and yet his quintet, written when he was, remarkably, still composing well into his nineties, speaks the same tonal, lyrical language as Jacob and Moody before him. Three generations of Englishmen, jazz-adjacent or classically trained, all convinced the harmonica could sing Brahms as easily as blues.

Does Littera efface the memory of Reilly, or of John Sebastian Jr., harmonica’s other great classical champion? Not quite. His tone occasionally coarsens under pressure, and the top register can turn thin and reedy where Reilly floated. But the Quartetto Energie Nove plays with real sympathy, the engineering from RSI’s Auditorio in Lugano is warm and unforced, and the sheer novelty of hearing Kinsey’s music at all — largely unrecorded, criminally so — makes this issue worth seeking out. A minor disc, frankly, in the grand scheme of the catalog. But a genuinely charming one, and charm, delivered this well, is not nothing.