Intermezzo: Homage to Brahms was written as a style study into this great composer’s piano music. I have always had an enormous admiration and derived much inspiration from this great romantic, Johannes Brahms: his motivic and melodic symmetries, the chromatic progressions and contrapuntal lines, his rhythmic playfulness, and his ability to turn a calm meditative mood into a turbulent drama.

Thus, this intermezzo is an attempt to incorporate some of these characteristics into a short piano piece. Some other pianistic elements included in this work serve as a kind of Etude for the evolving pianist. For example, recurring octave leaps, both in the right as in the left hand, train the pianist to bounce the wrist and feel the actual distance of an octave at the keyboard. Later in the piece, the pianist is presented with some other pianistic techniques such as the toccata and the crossed-hands, both of which require dexterity and precision. Finally, musical passages where the two hands play very closely together are contrasted by phrases that occupy the entire wide range of the piano.