Introduction & Allegro

Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro is a real one-off: a chamber work about 10 minutes long, for harp, flute, clarinet, and string quartet. Essentially a showpiece, almost a miniature harp concerto, it was commissioned by the Maison Érard musical instrument company to promote its double-action pedal harp—possibly because about a year earlier, the rival firm Pleyel had launched its own new harp and commissioned Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane to display it. The piece dates from 1905, the same year as Ravel’s Sonatine and String Quartet—it cost him, he wrote, “a week of concentrated work and three sleepless nights”—and was first performed, rather later, at the Circle Music Hall of the French Photographic Society in Paris on February 22, 1907 with harpist Micheline Kahn. In the airborne Allegro and its rapt Introduction—precise, supple, and ineffably atmospheric—the composer puts his harpist through their paces, displaying a range of vibrant effects and glistening colours that brings out the very best in the instrument and its colleagues.