Sonatine en trio

arranged by Carlos Salzedo

Modéré

Mouvement de Menuet

Animé

One of the most seductive of all works featuring a solo harp is Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro, which is essentially a small-scale concerto for harp accompanied by flute, clarinet and string quartet. Unfortunately, even though he wrote so well for the instrument in that work - doing more than a little to establish the superiority of the Erard pedal harp over the Pleyel chromatic harp - Ravel never again presented it in a starring role. The American (French-born) harpist Carlos Salzedo might also have been thinking how unfortunate that was when he took part in a performance of the Introduction and Allegro under the composer’s direction in New York in 1928. He might even, as a founder-member of the Trio de Lutèce (along with the flautist Georges Barrère and the cellist Paul Kéfer) have ventured to ask Ravel to write a harp trio for him.

Anyway, in the absence of anything new from the composer, the harpist had to make do with his own trio arrangement of Ravel’s Sonatine, a solo piano work completed at much the same time as the Introduction and Allegro in 1905. Not long before Ravel’s death, Salzedo played the arrangement through for him, although he was by then too far gone in his final illness to say much about it. But if could give his approval to Larry Adler’s harmonica version of Boléro, he would surely not have withheld it from a sensitive arrangement like this.

Although Salzedo’s Sonatine en trio, as he called it, was written originally for harp, flute and cello, it actually sounds better on harp, flute and viola - which, of course, is the combination chosen by Debussy for his Sonate in 1915. The present version is particularly convincing in the first movement. In Ravel’s piano scoring the main theme is usually presented by right and left hands an octave apart with arpeggiated harmonies fitted in between: it is a characteristic Ravel sound which translates most idiomatically into a three-part texture of flute and viola lines in octaves with harp accompaniment. The rather more passionate second subject is naturally awarded to the viola and the poignant little closing theme to the flute.

The minuet - a dance form much favoured by Ravel until he discovered the waltz - is largely a matter for a gracious flute and a decorous harp, although the viola does have the occasional expressive colouring to add, not least effectively in support of the flute’s lingering echo from the first movement in the tiny trio section. If none of the three instruments has the percussive quality required by the principal material of the Animé finale, which is basically a keyboard toccata, the recurring allusions to the opening theme of the work lend themselves equally well to flute and viola and better still, above all in the dramatic coda, to the kind of three-part texture familiar from first movement.