French music has long featured prominently in John Wilson’s game plan. His previous all-Ravel miscellany won plaudits, notwithstanding a curiously unyielding La valse (Chandos, 3/22). Now comes Ravel’s magnum opus, revivified with a singular mix of practical ‘home scholarship’ and interpretative rigour.

Templates for the complete ballet were set in the 1950s not so much by the pioneering LPs of Ernest Ansermet and Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht as the subsequent efforts of Charles Munch and Pierre Monteux. Monteux, less febrile than his Alsatian colleague, had conducted the premiere. More recently, François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles (Harmonia Mundi, 6/17) staked their own claim to authenticity through the deployment of well-behaved period instruments after a thorough spring clean of the notoriously unreliable orchestral parts. John Wilson addresses that issue in yet more comprehensive fashion, having spent Covid lockdowns preparing a new edition. Chandos’s generous supporting documentation includes his own explanation, an essay by Roger Nichols, a detailed scenario and photos ancient and modern. Members of the newly constituted Sinfonia of London Chorus are listed, too, although orchestral player identities – Wilson’s exalted ‘scratch’ band typically contains moonlighting principals and section leaders – remain chiefly mysterious. The flautist, we know, is Adam Walker, the leader John Mills.

Interpretatively speaking, Wilson aims to unite the Apollonian and Dionysian, as perspicacious about matters of sonority and articulation as Roth while operating at higher emotional voltage. Despite shinier surfaces, nothing is generalised or conspicuously un Gallic. String lines are ravishingly shaped and lit from within, whether boldly immediate or no more than a diaphanous skein of sound. A transparency not always obtainable from conventional ensembles ensures the audibility of woodwind and brass. You just know that the rising horn figures in the ‘Danse légère et gracieuse de Daphnis’ will be achieved discreetly and sans wobble even if, some might say, that hard-to-define sense of symphonic continuity proves more elusive. Wilson’s preoccupation with colour and texture extends to the vowel sounds of the chorus. Its ‘ah’s are doleful ‘oo’s in the hard-to-pitch Introduction to the second tableau. Later, expect some Munch-style ‘hiya’s for the pirates as well as notably fruity blasts from the orchestral depths. The ‘Lever du jour’ is predictably fabulous, more expansive than Monteux’s, with sonic space for each half-lit rivulet and emerging bird. The ‘Danse générale’, never noisy or thick, might just be the raciest since 1955. Munch enthusiasts (of whom Wilson is plainly one) might feel a lack of erotic charge even here.

Not the least of the glories of the present set is the sound per se. In an age when studio recording is no longer de rigueur it’s quite something to find producer Brian Pidgeon and sound engineer Ralph Couzens returning again and again to St Augustine’s, Kilburn, successfully balancing immediacy and bloom. The team also had to interpret Ravel’s essentially unworkable instructions regarding the placement of the chorus. No coupling but for my money this is the finest recorded Daphnis for a generation.