This composition began its life as an assignment for Ann Boeckman’s music theory class at Lawrence University somewhere around 2008. We were told to write a small piano work informed by our study of the late piano works of Johannes Brahms, as best exemplified by his intermezzi. What I turned in to class that time was a work vaguely resembling the work you will now come to know. It was much shorter to begin with and it was missing about half of the eventually completed work. It was only in 2011, three years after having turned in that initial assignment, that finished the Intermezzo as best I could at that time. It was this completion of the work that made its way into my first album titled An Everlasting Dawn (2017) where Alison Farr’s subtle touch added its magic to the music. As far as I knew or imagined, that was to be the end of the genesis for the Intermezzo.

In 2018 the Mexican Embassy to Italy in Rome organised a cultural event around the successful launch of my album and I had the pleasure and honour to have the work premiered in performance by Italian pianist Massimo Spada. The rest of the works on the album also made their premieres that same evening with Michela Guarrera providing a stunning soprano for the vocal works.

The Intermezzo, however, had not yet said its last, as I would later find out. In Guadalajara in the early autumn of 2022 I met Miguel Ángel Grajeda at the premiere of (an arrangement of) my orchestral work Kitichi when he stood in for a rehearsal for the orchestra’s pianist. He liked the music so much that he asked for my catalogue. I indulged him and he quickly made up his mind to play the Intermezzo in his upcoming recital. When I opened the score for the work, however, I saw quite a few important things that I now knew needed to be fixed, ammended or otherwise. So I made up my mind to revise the work for a last time before its performance in this new guise. I was happy enough with it that its publication now seemed agreeable—something I hope you will agree with me on. By Rodrigo Ruiz.