Concert pianist reacts to Rousseau's C# Minor Nocturne by Chopin

Añadido: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Hello YouTube. In today's video, we're taking a look at a very famous piece of Frederick Shopan. This is his nocturn in C# minor as performed by none other than Russo. Now, many of you have said to me, "Why am I so hard on Russo?" There's no reason, I promise you, other than the simple fact that these are the videos that come up nowadays when people search for these very famous pieces by Shopen.

[00:00:24]Now, what he does in this video ranges from the good to the questionable to the downright wrong. And there's a lot that we can learn from in terms of piano playing and in terms of interpretation of Shopopen and romantic music. So, let's just go ahead and dive right in and see what Rouso has for us today with this C#arp minor noctturn.

[00:01:00]All right. So, we need to talk just a little bit about this opening because Rouso makes a mistake that I've heard from so many beginners, which is namely simply forgetting to count at the beginning. You might think, well, this is just sort of an improvisatory beginning, but nevertheless, you have to keep the pulse in this music. You have to feel 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and Now you might want to stretch that. But what you can't do is something like 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and two because then it just all breaks apart. It doesn't hold together. So if you want to stretch it, go ahead, but keep that pulse. 1 and 2 and 3 and four and 1 and two. You know, by the way, Shopen is using a structure here which is so common in music. It's the short short long short short and then the long phrase where he gives us this very interesting chord. It looks like a dominant seventh chord, but it's actually what we call an augmented sixth chord because the note on the top is spelled as an F double sharp. And rather than resolving to a D major chord like we would typically expect of an A major chord, we get this outward expansion of these two notes to G sharp.

[00:02:22]That's an augmented sixth chord again because the interval between the A and the G is an augmented sixth. Kind of a really cool and fascinating chord. And that's the one that needs to be emphasized. And Rouso could do even more of that. Now we come into the main theme. Let's listen to this.

[00:02:45]Wow.

[00:02:54]Okay. So, there's several things here that occur to me right off the bat which are very typical of Rouso's playing.

[00:02:59]First of all, this sort of insistence on playing the right hand slightly delayed as compared to the left hand. So, when he starts, he does this.

[00:03:09]You hear that? not together but always just a little bit delayed. And he does that in many many places. I think also here at the end something like that. You hear it all over the place. It almost becomes sort of like a tick in his playing. He doesn't seem to be able to play the hands regularly together. Now, you will hear, of course, from great pianists some fluctuation between the right and left hand. But what you'll hear more often if you listen to professional recordings of this piece, you'll almost never hear this sort of insistence on playing the right hand after the left hand. Instead, what you'll hear is preceding the left hand, the right hand coming in just a tiny bit too early because it draws, if I do something like this, it draws our attention almost subconsciously to that upper voice. Now, this next thing I notice in his playing, he really plays amazingly fast trills, and I commend him on that. I would just say remember in music like this, it's slow, it's calm music. It's not a race, it's not a competition, and it's perfectly okay to play those trills at a slower tempo so that you have something like this. Imagine the way they would be sung.

[00:04:18]Just a little bit more calmness in those. It almost sounds like he's just sort of going off to the races with this incredibly fast trill. One other thing incredibly important for the technique in playing shopen or any romantic music, this idea of weight transfer. You'll see a lot of great pianists when they play phrases like this, the fingers that are not playing are sort of free because they want to be able to transfer weight from one note to the next. So something a phrase like this really transferring weight and just feeling the fingers falling into the keys. What you see from Rouso is almost entirely a sort of finger technique. It looks like this.

[00:04:55]Just the fingers. The wrist stays sort of in this locked position. The fingers do this, but you don't get any kind of this incredible flexibility of the wrist which you'll see in almost all professional pianists playing shopen.

[00:05:09]Lots of flexibility here in the wrist.

[00:05:11]Lots of flexibility in this direction as well. Very important. Let's continue on again. Right there. The hands not together.

[00:05:21]There also there also there also.

[00:05:30]And there.

[00:05:35]there also.

[00:05:48]Yeah. And you know right here, Shopen actually writes conforza with force with energy and you get this big leap up here.

[00:05:57]Why not create more passion? This is a complaint that I have several places in this piece. It just feels like the left hand continues on, the right hand just sort of does this. There's not really any big change. There's not really any passion. That's what Shopopen is all about. Just because this is a soft and slow nocturn doesn't mean that you can't put that sort of passion. And it creates such a beautiful day crescendo and a beautiful sort of color coming down here from this very impassion music and this nice day crescendo coming into that. So, I would encourage Russo to do even more with the dynamics in this piece. Now, listen to the cool chord that's coming up. This is called the Batman. It's not officially called the Batman chord, but I like to call it the Batman chord. And I'll show you why in a second. This one right here.

[00:06:44]This chord.

[00:06:50]Now, why do we call that the Batman chord? Why do I call it the Batman chord? It's officially called a Neapolitan chord. It's a chord built on the flat second scale degree. So we're in the key of C# sharp minor here. This would be a C# sharp minor chord. If I go up one half step and play a major chord there, I get this sound. It's used in a lot of classic music. It's goes all the way back to Baroque music and so forth.

[00:07:12]But um I remember it best from the Michael Keaton Batman films because we there was a theme that was something like this, right? Maybe some of you remember that.

[00:07:23]The Batman chord, the Neapolitan chord.

[00:07:25]Moving on.

[00:07:33]Nice rounding off of the phrase there.

[00:07:34]Good job, Russo.

[00:07:48]All right. A a couple things there.

[00:07:50]We're in this new section. Suddenly with a glimmer of sunlight in the music, we have this world of A major. Right? We've been in this dark world of C# and suddenly we're in this much sunnier, more hopeful atmosphere of A major. And I think Shopopen writes here, by the way, pianimo. And shortly after he writes stov, which means subdued in sound. I think Russo needs to find another color here. Just a couple measures before we have this forte. This strong music, which he could also do much more with. and then a diminuendo and coming into this.

[00:08:29]I would love to hear this sort of like misty atmosphere much more work with the dynamics in creating different colors.

[00:08:36]The other thing that I would point out in this section and it's probably even more audible with headphones is that there are tiny little gaps in the legato. So, for example, when he does this, you'll hear a little gap between those two notes, and that really destroys this beautiful line. That has to do with this pedaling. It's something that I talk a lot about in my online course because pedaling is so crucial, which is why, as far as I know, it's the only online academy that actually talks about pedaling and shows you exactly what to do with a picture of the pedal in the videos. Um, when we do something like this, you have to change the pedal after you switch notes. And a lot of amateurs will change in between. They'll do this and lift the pedal and then play. And so this tiny little change of lifting the piano pedal afterwards creates a much better legato. And just the way you would sing it prevents there from being any sort of gaps in the music. We really want to avoid that. Now going on Yeah. And here is a place where he could do a much better job of rounding off the phrases. So when we have So the end of this, it has to has to sort of disappear. Same thing here at the end of and what we get instead, listen to it again if you didn't catch it.

[00:10:04]we get sort of just sitting on that F#.

[00:10:06]A big no no in Shopen because you want to have these beautiful rounded phrases sort of the way that we speak.

[00:10:11]Oftentimes when we speak we move up in the middle of the sentence and then at the end we go back down again. And music I think really comes from speech. This is a fascinating thing about the way that melodies are structured. The more you look at it the more you find this par these parallels with human speech.

[00:10:25]Continuing on.

[00:10:38]I really love his use of color here. The way that he does like a question and answer this one more strongly and then suddenly the pianimo.

[00:10:50]Very nice, Russo. Good job with that.

[00:10:53]Unfortunately, we're coming up to something here, which is one of those places which is just plain wrong. And I'll show you what I mean in just a second.

[00:11:11]1 2 3 1 2 3 Okay, so in this section, it's sort of like a mini kind of Merka rhythm in this uh section of the piece.

[00:11:20]And Russo's rhythm is just plain wrong.

[00:11:23]I don't know how else to say it, but you can't count 1 2 3 here like it's supposed to be. 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3.

[00:11:38]Even if you play it with a little bit of robato, you can't just sort of completely break the rhythm. And what he does here, it's just incorrect. It's just try and count 1 2 3 along with him as he plays. You'll see just like at the beginning of the piece what I was talking about. If you try and count along, it doesn't work. So, this section needs to be substantially different.

[00:11:56]Continuing on, this is very beautiful here. Way he takes his time here, lets the phrase just really dissipate. Very nice.

[00:12:19]And you know, again, I just it's it's almost just like a little tick. Like I said, every time the left hand and then the right hand, this isn't done anymore by professional pianists. Certainly not with such predictability and regularity. Uh that needs to be much less Yeah. Yeah. You know, here I I just find myself saying, "Where is the passion in this music?" Shopen writes forte. He writes crescendo. He writes this big line and it creates such a beautiful contrast between the forte and the piano afterwards. I would love to see and hear Russo doing so much more with that. And remember, you've got to support with the left hand. A lot of people just do these kind of things in the right hand and think that by playing strongly up here, they're making a nice difference. No, you've got to help out with the left hand, your bass, just like a car coming down the street. What do you hear when it's really loud? You don't hear the treble, you hear the bass, right? It's all about that bass. So, you got to support with the left hand. You've got to keep that strong.

[00:13:29]That's really where your dynamic changes are going to come from. Continuing on.

[00:13:46]Yeah. And again here this sort of failure to resolve the notes. So Shopen gives us a slur between these and instead what we get is like this uh as if the notes are are not connected. Now this for me again comes from language when we say words like jumping, running, going. You notice the sort of emphasis we automatically have on that. A lot of two-cllable words are like this. And for me when I hear it in music, it sounds like somebody saying jumping, running, going. It doesn't make any sense and it just stick that's why it sticks out to me like a sore thumb and I think would to most professionals that lack of sensitivity to these resolutions of the slurs of the phrases. Now comes another phrase where Shopen writes conforza and I would love to hear more power here.

[00:14:36]Listen to this.

[00:14:40]Okay, that's supposed to be a conforze and a lot of passion. Shopopen could not be more direct here in what he's asking for. He wants this phrase and probably moving forward here. Taking some liberty with the tempo as the music moves forward and then we come back down in tempo and dynamics to the piano. I I would love to hear sort of more sensitivity to that. Let's listen here.

[00:15:13]This is not an opassionato, right? This is not full of passion.

[00:15:19]It's too slow and it's just too soft, unfortunately.

[00:15:25]Nice trill though.

[00:15:30]And I will say he does great scales here.

[00:15:35]Really, really nice. I don't know if they were maybe they were tweaked a little in post-processing, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt. I think it's uh, you know, really, really, really, really nice. very even like a bree like a little bit of of of wind through the through the through the bushes or the trees the forest very nice um retardando that he does at the end there slowing down I would only say again at the in the last two measures we get this big separation between the hands without any real expressive reason. Just play them together. It's fine. And you know, he he does a great job of making a very organic retardando. So, I congratulate him on that. Like I said, some very good things, a few things that are questionable, and some things that are downright wrong. At any rate, I hope you've appreciated my opinions, which of course are my opinions and mine alone, but I hope you found something that perhaps you can use in your own piano playing. Thanks for watching. Be sure to like and subscribe. And I'll look forward to seeing you again in the next video.