Improvisação

I wrote Improvisação in 1993 in the city of West Hartford in the United States, where I was doing my Masters degree in Music. I was asked to write this piece by the Brazilian horn player Fernando de Morais, a fellow student with whom I would soon lose touch without ever finding out whether he had played it.

Then in 2008, in the fifth edition of the Setmana Colombo-Catalana, a festival that I run in Bogotá, it was officially performed in public for the first time by the Valencian horn player Juan Conrado García and pianist Daniel García. I revised the music for that first performance, producing the version offered in this edition.

The work is written in ternary form, ABA’, and broadly speaking it is composed as an improvisation, as the title suggests, or a rhapsody. In terms of its structure, it begins with a short introduction, followed by the main lyrical theme on the horn. This main theme is gradually and freely developed by the two instruments. In the middle of the piece there is a binary section in a jazz style, which has some interesting figures on the piano. After this central section of contrasts, the music from the introduction makes a reappearance in a different guise.

Perhaps one of the most noteworthy features of the piece is its expressive depth, which is at its greatest in the solist’s cantabile.

Moisès Bertran