Music for Meditation-Brahms and Kissin

By Mark George, President and CEO

A weekly recommendation of music for meditation. Find a comfortable chair or lie down, turn on a smart speaker or put in earbuds, and just listen.

My recommendation this week for Music as Meditation is the Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118, No. 2 by Johannes Brahms. I hesitated at first, thinking the piece was too familiar or well-known.  But I quickly came to my senses and realized that the work deserves its status as one of the most beloved in the repertoire. The piece, marked Andante teneramente (slowly and dearly) is part of a set of six pieces for piano, composed late in Brahms’s life and dedicated to his friend Clara Schumann.

The music is introspective and nostalgic. Brahms is remembering something from the past that is so sweet that it transcends time and becomes part of the musical present. The work is easily melodic and filled with harmonic nuance. Listen along for 6 minutes and 55 seconds and let the music tell you a story. The recording is a live performance by Evgeny Kissin, the great pianist who would have been honored this year by the Music Institute of Chicago at its annual gala.

Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118, No. 2 (1893)     Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

(6' 55")

Evgeny Kissin, piano

Evgeny Kissin was born in Moscow in October 1971 and began to play by ear and improvise on the piano at the age of two. At six years old, he entered a special school for gifted children, the Moscow Gnessin School of Music, where he was a student of Anna Pavlovna Kantor, who has remained his only teacher. 

A 1999 review in the “The Times of London” stated:
All the hall marks of his genius - and one does not use the word lightly - were on display: the rich, sonorous tone, the dazzling fingerwork and, above all, the inspired fantasy. So compelling is Kissin's pianism, so fresh his response to even the most familiar phrases, that one hangs on every note. The end of the slow movement found me gripping the armrest of my seat, mesmerized by the poetry of his reading.