It was Igor Stravinsky, ever reliable for a barbed quote, who once described Ravel as ‘the most perfect of Swiss clockmakers’. He possibly didn’t realise that Ravel’s father was a French-Swiss inventor engineer, so his quip wasn’t so wide of the mark. Ravel’s mother was Basque. Combine Swiss clockwork and Spanish heat and you come up with L’heure espagnole, Ravel’s delicious farce about Concepción, the Toledo clockmaker’s wife, and her convoluted love life, which sees two of her paramours hiding inside clocks before she falls for hunky muleteer Ramiro.

L’heure espagnole is the main work on the latest disc in François-Xavier Roth’s Ravel series with Les Siècles for Harmonia Mundi. As in previous releases, the orchestral playing is exquisite, the strings silky, woodwinds perfumed, the trumpets (1930s Selmers) sweetly tangy, the trombones suggestively louche. Roth’s pacing is steady – three or four minutes slower than Lorin Maazel or Swiss precisionist Ernest Ansermet – but it flows.

The detailed recording opens with plenty of noisy ticking and whirring mechanisms as the woodwinds unfurl sleepily, drowsy muted trumpet sounding a distant reveille. Percussive effects are recorded closely – in-your-ear whip cracks and chimes – and there’s a wonderful sense of being caught up in the crossfire.

Roth has gathered a superb francophone cast, led by Isabelle Druet as Ravel’s desperate housewife. Her sexy Concepción prowls with a warm expressive mezzo and she relishes the risqué line, ‘the mechanism is very fragile, especially the pendulum’. Roth also relishes the wit when Concepción’s sexual frustration is punctured by a droning bassoon.

Loïc Félix is a droll Torquemada, his tenor contrasting nicely with the light, flexible voice of Julien Behr as Gonzalve, Concepción’s florid poet lover. Jean Teitgen’s bass is a little woolly as the pompous Don Íñigo Gómez. Thomas Dolié is Ramiro, the naive muleteer whose muscles – and muscular baritone – prove a winning combination for Concepción.

The habanera quintet at the end is hip-snakingly slinky, but that’s not the end of the disc. Roth maintains the Spanish focus with the hypnotic Boléro. As with his Pictures at an Exhibition disc (7/20), where the main work was upstaged by an incredible La valse, this Boléro threatens to upstage L’heure espagnole … very nearly succeeding. It’s a terrific vehicle for the musicians of Les Siècles, who turn in a series of suggestive, steamy solos.

Roth restores the original tabors (two) instead of the usual side drum and employs a sarrusophone instead of a contrabassoon. He also slips in a zesty late surprise … at 13'01" castanets join the percussive fray, rapping out the ostinato rhythm. Apparently they were featured in the original score but Ravel removed them from later editions. A naughty authenticity, perhaps, but one that brought a broad grin to my face. As, indeed, did the whole disc.