Władysław Szpilman

The harrowing story of the Polish pianist and composer Władysław Szpilman, who survived the German occupation of Warsaw and the Holocaust, is well known from Roman Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist. Born in 1911, Szpilman studied with the Chopin specialist Aleksander Michałowski, a well-known pianist and pedagogue. Szpilman became popular as both a pianist and a versatile composer in Warsaw in the 1930s. Although his post-war recordings include a range of solo works—including Chopin, Prokofiev and the first recording of Bacewicz’s Piano Sonata No. 2—Szpilman’s finest work is embodied in chamber collaborations, especially with the violinist Bronisław Gimpel, with whom he recorded violin sonatas by Beethoven and Grieg, and as a member of the Warsaw Piano Quintet in persuasive accounts of piano quintets by Schumann and Juliusz Zarębski. Szpilman’s compositions include an imaginative Concertino for piano and orchestra (1940), a haunting and Chopinesque Mazurek in F Minor (1942), composed in the Warsaw ghetto, and a three-movement Suite The Life of the Machines (1933) with more cosmopolitan nods to Prokofiev and Bartók.