The Introduction emerged—slow, hesitant, like footsteps in a corridor of mirrors. The flute and clarinet, imagined in her memory, wove around her: a breath of woodsmoke, a whisper of reeds by a river at dusk. The strings (she heard them in her mind’s ear) answered with long, cool phrases, like hands reaching through mist.
Elara didn’t sigh. She smiled.
Suddenly, the room dissolved. She stood on a bridge in a city that didn’t exist—part Paris, part Kyoto, part watercolor. The harp became a cascade: droplets turned to scales, scales turned to birds. A clarinet call from a distant garden. A flute trill from a lantern-lit boat below. The string quartet was the current of the river itself, urgent and tender, pulling her forward. imslp ravel introduction and allegro