🌙🎻 Frédéric Chopin – Nocturne in C-sharp minor (Op. posthumous) YuEun Kim – violin 🎻 • In November 1944, a German officer walked into a ruined building in Warsaw and found a man hiding inside. The man said he was a pianist. The officer demanded proof. When he sat down at the piano and began to play this piece, the officer decided to protect him. The officer was Wilm Hosenfeld. The pianist was Władysław Szpilman, and that scene reached cinemas in 2002, when Roman Polanski filmed The Pianist. • Chopin hid grafts of other pieces of his inside this Nocturne. In the middle section, there are literal quotations from his Piano Concerto No. 2, which he had finished months earlier in Warsaw. Further on, the echo of his song Życzenie (A Maiden's Wish) appears, composed in 1829 to verses by a Polish poet. Those who listened at home recognized these self-quotations as private signals. To everyone else, they were just beautiful passages. To his family, they were notes. • This piece was born for solo piano. The arrangement for violin and piano, still the standard, is by the Russian violinist Nathan Milstein, and it's the one YuEun Kim plays here. The Korean, trained in Seoul and Los Angeles, recorded this interpretation in 2016, on her personal channel. The video passed nine million views and turned into a serious project: in 2018, with pianist Sahun Hong, she formed a duo dedicated to arranging Chopin's Nocturnes for violin and piano. In the section you just heard, the opening theme returns ornamented and slower; the bow barely presses on the strings, and the piano stays in the background, sustaining. A piece Chopin never wanted to publish, played today by someone who understood why. • 👉 Follow for the best of classical music daily on your feed. • • • #violin #chopin #violinist #classicalmusic - @reels.classics