Wladyslaw Szpilman - Pianist and Composer

F. Chopin: Nocturne C sharp-minor Op. posth.

Wladyslaw Szpilman - piano

Recorded 12/1997 in Warsaw ©A.Szpilman 2002, Cameraman J.Mazur

Wladyslaw Szpilman, Polish pianist and composer who had to leave Germany in 1933 after studying with Arthur Schnabel and Franz Schreker. Enjoyed great success in Poland, where his career was abruptly broken off by Germany's attack on Poland in 1939. Survived the Warsaw Getto. Composed about 300 songs, many of which are still popular in Poland today. Wrote a small number of 'serious' works too, which are now available through Boosey & Hawkes / Bote & Bock for the first time. Pre-war compositions include the piano suite The Life of Machines and the Concertino for piano and orchestra that he finished in the getto. His amalgamation of serious and popular music is rooted in the stylistic tradition of the twenties.

"Szpilman is near to neo-classicism. His music does not know of late romantic pathos, but sounds lively and translucent." – Basler Zeitung

Krzysztof Penderecki

on Saturday, 12.08.2006, Berlin at 8 p.m.

Konzerthaus Berlin

Krzysztof Penderecki Director
Tomasz Tomaszewski Violin
Junges Klangforum Mitte Europa (International)

Wladyslaw Szpilman – Overture for Symphony Orchestra, (1968)
Krzysztof Penderecki – Violin Concert0 (1976)
Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphonie Nr. 4 B-Dur op. 60

Known past and future performances information and other facts

From SONY Classical Germany

on 30.9.2005

On 3 CD´s:

Solo recordings: Chopin, Alfred Grünfeld, Debussy, Ignaz Friedman, Szpilman, Prokofjew 7th Sonata, Bacewicz, Sonata Nr. 2 (1st publication of the world premiere in 1953)

Works for Violin and Piano with Bronislaw Gimpel: Beethoven "Spring", Grieg op.45, Rathaus "Pastorale and Dance" (1st publication of the world premiere recording in 1963) and small works by Schubert, Dvorak, Wieniawski, Bloch, Prokofiew

The Warsaw Piano Quintet: Piano quintets by Robert Schumann and Juliusz Zarebski (1st publication world premiere recording 1963)

How war transforms 'Pianist'

For all of its devastating power, Roman Polanski's film The Pianist reaches a point where it doesn't entirely ring true. How could anybody emerge from five horrific years of hard labor and starvation in World War II Warsaw with such clean, crisp, emotionally unclouded renditions of Chopin?

The real-life Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose memoir was the basis of the film, didn't play that way. Even before hearing the two Szpilman discs that have hit the market amid the two-Oscar success of The Pianist, seasoned music lovers could have predicted that. Polish pianism of that period is more about shade than light.

But anyone can understand that artistic expression, even the supposedly stationary world of classical music, cannot exist in a demilitarized zone, standing apart from world events. Performances conceived, delivered and heard during a state of crisis, or in its aftermath, can be hugely different from those that are not.

Szpilman's fellow musicians - whatever side they were on during the war - changed so much over the 1940s and after that the great masterpieces they performed seemed to rewrite themselves. You can hear it in before-and-after recordings, in which one conductor beefed up the militaristic brass, and another found a conduit for psychic pain in the music's dissonances.

Similarly, the world changed after Sept. 11 - and for a while, so did the music-making. How the current war will change what we hear remains to be, well, heard.

You could argue that such changes have most to do with how we hear. But this is only partially true. I made a point of listening to the Szpilman discs (one from the independent label BCI Eclipse and the other from the German branch of Sony Classical) before and after seeing the film. What I heard didn't change, but the film explained a few things.

Szpilman, who died three years ago, was an artist of sterling pedigree, which all but guarantees his recordings won't be a redux of the David Helfgott-style compromised pianism heard in the wake of the 1996 film Shine. No, from the first notes of both Szpilman discs, you hear poetic, Old-World rubato and that warm blanket of piano tone that's missing from the film's soundtrack performances by Janusz Olejniczak.

Most arresting is a 1960 reading of Schumann's Fantasy in C major, the middle movement, which reaches an utterly singular, harrowingly intense climax. Nobody can really say this reflects Szpilman's wartime hardships, but my intuition tells me, unmistakably, that only someone who has paid rent in the abyss could conceive such phrase readings.

Nearly identical in their selection of works, the two discs differ mainly in Sony's inclusion of a CD-ROM video feature of the aging Szpilman playing Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp minor in 1980. That's where the film offers needed context. The dignity of the pianist's manner has infinitely more impact if you know that this is the piece he was playing when Polish Radio was destroyed by the Nazis and that he returned to five years later, after the Nazis had been destroyed. Without asking for the slightest bit of sympathy, he was recreating a moment that was emblematic for his country and all Jewish survivors of World War II.

David Patrick Stearns Philadelphia Courier Sun, Mar. 30, 2003

also from SONY Classical

CD 93516

Wladyslaw Szpilman Works for Piano & Orchestra

Concertino for piano and orchestra, Waltz in the Olden Style*, Paraphrase on an Original Theme*, Introduction to a Film*

Little Overture, Ballet Scene*, Suite "The Live of the Machines"*, Three Little Folk Song Suites*

Ewa Kupiec - Piano, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Director - John Axelrod

Recorded in Berlin on 26-28th June 2004, Published in first edition by Boosey & Hawkes in 2004

* World Premiere on CD

Website SONY Classical

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Wladyslaw Szpilman

Suite : Das Leben der Maschinen (The Life of the Machines) (1933). Für Klavier solo

bei amazon.de

Krystian Zimerman: Preface to the Edition Wladyslaw Szpilman

It appears difficult, indeed impossible, to find a clear place for Wladyslaw Szpilman, the person or his work, in the history of 20th century music. We can only come closer to him by refraining from attempts to categorise him. This is due on the one hand to his remarkable biography: the severity and intensity of the emotional shocks and deprivations that shaped Szpilman, a survivor of the holocaust, exceed anything we would be capable of understanding. On the other hand his musical language reflects the stylistic diversity and undogmatic attitude of the time in which his development as a young man was completed: the late ’20sand early ’30s of the last century. It is a language that plays with ambiguity, with masks hiding things that were perhaps too much to expect oneself or the sounds to express.

Wladyslaw Szpilman – who was known for a long time outside Poland only as a pianist – was more than a musician, being rather a musicmaker in the emphatic sense of the word. Composing was just one aspect of his diverse work, and doubtless the least known, if we ignore the popularity of his songs. He left a small oeuvre of orchestral and piano compositions that are being made accessible to the public for the first time in this edition, as well as film music and even applied music ranging as far as the opening music for the Polish cinema newsreel. Szpilman did not compose sub specie aeternitatis, but for the moment he was living and experiencing.

And that points to an emotional dimension in the background to his work – one that is a little easier to understand after Roman Polanski’s film of his memoirs, in which Szpilman narrates his miraculous survival in Warsaw during the Second World War. I say very deliberately: a little. Despite the inspired film and eyewitness reports, we simply cannot come close to imagining a state of living for years in a constant fear of death. It is therefore my view that Szpilman cannot be compartmentalised somewhere within the stylistic genres of the twentieth century, but is rather someone who was able to value the freedom he had regained and to live it. His purview of the various currents in music was very extensive and was not restricted by any doctrine. He composed music to express himself without thinking about whether he was thereby affiliating himself with one particular movement or whether what he was saying would further his career in the marketplace. Instead, music was for him more of an expression of his joy in being alive and not a means of applying learnt techniques. So it is also no surprise that his music is full of positive energy, of an almost resurrection-like character. And that was also what his personality was like when I got to know him, full of jovial cheerfulness, an elderly man whose young spirit never missed an opportunity to crack a joke here and there.

I am not speaking here of superficiality! Experiencing a performance of the piano quintet of Grazyna Bacewicz by the Warsaw Piano Quintet he had founded, I was deeply gripped by the modest means with which he as able to create a drama that shook the audience. Everything was authentic, yet "simple" and not "staged". One always had the feeling that the musicians knew precisely what they were playing and why they were on the stage.

I am delighted and honoured to recall the unique personality of Wladyslaw Szpilman here for this edition from Boosey & Hawkes.

© 2004 Krystian Zimerman / Boosey & Hawkes – Bote & Bock

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

The Pianist and the Pop Star

He's known as the dreamy Chopin interpreter in Roman Polanksi's film, but Wladyslaw Szpilman was primarily a hitmaker on the pop charts, ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN discovers

On Sept. 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played the last live piano recital heard over Polish radio before it was blown off the air by German bombing. As he recounts in his memoir, Death of a City (the basis of Roman Polanski's film The Pianist ), the shelling was audible during his performance, and so heavy afterward that he had to wait two hours before walking home through the rubble and smoke.
That evening, as German artillery again battered Warsaw, Szpilman worked on a Concertino for Piano and Orchestra , pausing at dusk to look out the window to see what new damage had been done in the neighbourhood.
"Outside the door of our building," he writes, "lay the corpse of a woman with her head and one arm blown off . . . Her blood flowed into the gutter in a long, dark stream, and then ran on into a drain covered by a grating."
Szpilman continued writing his Concertino as the Germans subdued the city and began the repressions that eventually wiped out most of its half-million Jews, including Szpilman's mother, father and three siblings. You can imagine how his fear and apprehension expressed itself in the music he was writing in the family apartment.
You can imagine it -- but you won't hear it anywhere in the music. The Concertino , which like Szpilman himself survived the war (he died in 2000 at age 88), is a breezy souvenir of the symphonic jazz age. Blue notes, rag-time rhythms and suave orchestrations suggest the kind of music George Gershwin might have written if, like Szpilman, he had studied with a high-brow German composer like Franz Schreker.
Thanks to Polanski's film, Szpilman's tale of survival is now known to millions, and his 1946 memoir, recently published in English in paperback as The Pianist , is a bestseller. His music is also coming to light outside Poland, with a recent American recording of songs featuring Montreal singer Wendy Lands, and a plan by the eminent British music company Boosey & Hawkes to publish Szpilman's piano and orchestral pieces and his 500-odd surviving pop songs.
Yes, pop songs. Szpilman apparently spun them out as easy as breathing, before, after and even during the war, when according to his son Andrzej, he worked on a musical that was performed in the Warsaw ghetto.
"People were always asking him for songs," said Andrzej, on the phone from Germany. "He was writing them in the coffee bar, in three minutes, between the coffee and the cake. We found some written on napkins, and some of these were big hits."
Szpilman hit the charts 150 times in Poland, and several of his songs remain pop standards in that country. This side of his career poses an intriguing contrast to the dreamy Chopin interpreter and a puzzle for those who assume that the events of a composer's life -- especially tragic events -- directly colour the music.
Read any program note about a stormy piece by Beethoven or Brahms, and you're almost certain to see a connection made between the tone of the music and the real-life trouble that "inspired" it. And yet counterexamples abound, when composers wrote apparently light-hearted music through periods of grave personal difficulty. Mozart was ill and broke for much of his career, yet that doesn't diminish the buoyant good humour of The Magic Flute .
Szpilman had a talent for light music, and none of the horrors he experienced prevented him from exercising it. His Waltzes in the Olden Style evoke the kind of grand ballroom that only ever existed in Hollywood, when Jewish émigré composers such as Erich Korngold and Max Steiner ruled the sound studios. His Ballet Scene is almost a parody of highfalutin European music, in which evocations of French impressionism and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring rub up against the debonair jazz style of the Concertino .
These period bonbons are contained on a sampler disc from Boosey, which hopes to place them on orchestral pops programs wherever The Pianist has been seen. But the first effort to bring the songs to a wider public -- Wendy Lands Sings the Music of the Pianist , on Universal's Hip-O label -- goes all out to present Szpilman's music as the sound of the present moment.
You may be hard-pressed to imagine these tuneful numbers being written in prewar Poland, or under the Communist regime that prevented Szpilman from travelling abroad during the late forties and early fifties (he later toured widely with the Warsaw Piano Quintet, playing Toronto in 1977). Producer John Leftwich hired writers to devise new English lyrics (not translations), and updated the arrangements -- or rather, back-dated them, to suit the current fashion for well-worn Americana.
The style ranges from soft jazz cabaret to a cheeky country mode, with slide guitar riffs and ironic asides on a café violin. Some of these tunes and settings sound like they would suit Norah Jones, though Lands shows a passing vocal resemblance to another Jones -- Rickie Lee. The tunes' Central European origin shows in small things -- a turn of phrase or harmonic shift that fleetingly evokes a vanished world. These could be the songs of a forgotten contributor to the American Songbook.
That was apparently the goal. Andrzej Szpilman, who acted as executive producer for the Lands disc, points out that Szpilman's pop music already speaks American, or at least an off-shore dialect. The Jewish European influence was an important element in the formation of an American popular sound (think of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and Gershwin) and jazz was common in the Berlin cabarets when Szpilman studied there in the early thirties.
Szpilman had a prodigious memory. In a passage near the end of Death of a City , he describes how he spent the last winter of the war hiding in a ruined attic, with no heat and almost no food, staying sane only by going over in his mind "all the compositions I had ever played, bar by bar." When he returned to concert life, his classical repertoire was intact. But he often forgot his songs.
"My father never believed in his songs," Andrzej said. "He wrote them and he hated them, especially the hits. He said that the better song is never the hit, and the worse music is always the most popular . . .
"He told me, 'A song is like a butterfly. You write it, you give it away, you forget it.' "
That's almost a credo for the importance of fleeting diversions, which were needed in Warsaw under the Nazis and during the Cold War as much as anywhere else. Polanski didn't have the scope to show it, but as Andrzej points out, the Jewish culture of Warsaw thrived defiantly right up until the first mass deportations in the fall of 1942. Why not put on a musical in the Warsaw ghetto? Why yield anything of your culture, especially when someone else is shouting that it and you are worthless, a contagion in the body of Aryan Europe?
Wladyslaw Szpilman never deserted Poland. The Nazis were driven out, and the Communists deposed. Through it all, people still needed to hear music, and to sing songs, including songs about youthful love and the feeling of spring in Warsaw. However bad the times, the tragic muse is never the only one.By ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
Saturday, May 3, 2003 - The Globe and Mail Canada Page R6

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Now available from SONY CLASSICAL

Wladyslaw Szpilman: Original recordings of the pianist

W. Szpilman plays works of Szpilman, Bach, Rachmaninow, Chopin a.o.

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Polish National Philharmonic / A. Wit, National Philharmonic Hall, Warsaw, Poland
The Polish pianist
Warsaw is in the grip of a mania – Szpilmania, to be precise. The face of Wladyslaw Szpilman stares out at you from bus stops. The papers are full of Szpilman articles. His family seem to be permanent fixtures on radio and TV. The excitement has been caused by Roman Polanski's film The Pianist, winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival in February and released this month in Poland (it opens in Britain later this year). It's based on Szpilman's gripping account of his survival of the Warsaw ghetto and his brushes with death in the bombed-out city. The book had made the bestseller lists by the time Szpilman died, aged 88, in 2000; Polanski survived the Krakow ghetto, and Szpilman's tale spoke directly to him.
This concert of Szpilman's compositions, which capped celebrations of the composer, illustrated the duality of his musical life. Having studied the piano with Schnabel and composition with Schreker, Szpilman was one of Poland's foremost classical pianists, spending 50 years on the concert platform, but for the harrowing interruption of his incarceration and flight. And yet his musical legacy is largely of lighter music: he composed some 450 popular songs, a selection of which, sung by Irena Santor, formed the second half of the concert.
The first half consisted of a bustling, neo-Classical Little Overture, the introduction from his score to the film Calls to My Wife, with soaring string melodies à la Mantovani, a Concertino for piano and orchestra, a Ballet Scene and an ironically sentimental Waltz in the Old Style – the sum total of his orchestral output.
The Concertino was written in 1940, in the teeth of the Nazi terror. But the bright and buoyant music betrays nothing of its origins: its blend of classical format and jazzy melodic inflection is Gershwin in the ghetto, the debt to the Rhapsody in Blue obvious.
A suite for solo piano from 1933, The Life of Machines, with pounding Bartokian figures in its first movement, a wistful central section, and sardonic, Prokofievan toccata-finale, preceded the Ballet Scene of 1948, a mix of more Gershwin and the Prokofiev of the Scythian Suite, with a soupçon of The Rite of Spring – stomping rhythms obscuring a sense of humour that popped its head up when allowed.
Wladyslaw Szpilman will become a household name when Polanski's film is released internationally. So it's a pity he wrote so little for his instrument. Still, the fetching melodies of those hundreds of songs have endeared themselves to the Poles, and we'll doubtless be hearing a lot of them over here, too.
Independent on 26.09.2002 Review by Martin Anderson

Berlin, 20 May 2001

World Premiere of the Piano-Suite "The Life of the Machines" (1932) by Wladyslaw Szpilman Performed by Guenter Herzfeld

Curt-Sachs-Hall Berlin Philharmony House

On April 29th, 2001 Peter Gimpel, Founder and Curator of the "Jakob and Bronislaw Gimpel Archives" writes:

"I am happy to give you the original manuscript of your father´s Suita for Piano, (a personal copy 1934 -as) inscribed by your father, Wladyslaw Szpilman to my father, Jakob Gimpel... I feel very privileged to have been able to contribute to the preservation of your father´s memory and work".

Los Angeles Times

Musically Mixed 'Reflections' on Holocaust

The Holocaust has become one of the most frequently invoked catalysts for composition in the 20th century--and now, beyond. It is also one of the most problematic. The risk of not doing justice to an event of such unbelievable horror must weigh like a heavy stone upon a composer's mind.And it is a loaded subject for the reviewer. No one questions the sincerity and commitment of the composers and performers, but sometimes you have to separate the subject matter from what your ears are telling you.Those challenges were present in the "Remembrances: Reflections on the Holocaust" program from conductor Noreen Green and the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony at Encino's Valley Beth Shalom on Sunday night--laudably ambitious in scope, serious in tone......The most memorable work was not a Holocaust piece per se. Rather, it was a Piano Concertino by Wladyslaw Szpilman (1911-2000), written in the Warsaw Getto in 1940 but never performed until Sunday night, with a remarkable 16-year-old pianist, Arthur Abadi, doing solo honors. Playing on a catchy four-note motif, the piece sounds like a European reaching across the sea to a fellow Jewish composer, George Gershwin, with bluesy, rhapsodic flourishes capped by a jazzy final chord... L.A.Times, May 1, 2001 By RICHARD S. GINELL

THE PIANIST AND THE CRITIC
“Those who can’t do, review.”
by Leonardo Ciampa

     Last night I finally saw Roman Polanski’s film, The Pianist. I avoided it like the plague, the bitter taste from Shine being still in my mouth. (Shine was a perfectly enjoyable movie, until I actually heard Mr. Helfgott play in real life. Perhaps he was so named because even mit der Hilfe Gottes he still can’t play accurately.)
     Not so with the Pianist and its subject, Wladyslaw Szpilman.*
     Firstly, just in terms of moviemaking itself, The Pianist is a phenomenal artistic achievement. This fact was all the more palpable because the previous movie my wife and I had seen was Gangs of New York. In comparison to Polanski’s work, Scorsese’s was like a bad comic book. Typical Hollywood sensationalism which, starting from the very first scene, screams to the viewer, “This is not in any way realistic or even artistic. This is just an extravaganza of superficiality designed to win awards.”
     The Pianist had the ring of truth from the getgo – in large part due to the fact that Szpilman’s work was written in 1946. How brave to document his tragedy so soon after it ended.
     There is an old adage, “Those who can’t do, review.” It’s one of those silly sayings about which I wish I could say, “They’re not accurate – they’re just debunking expressions used by people who like to dish.” Experience, however, has told me that this expression in particular is a truthful one.
     Critic Norman Lebrecht suffers from the same ailment as virtually every other critic: They seem to be against everything but for nothing. Lebrecht’s book, The Maestro Myth, is a case in point. He glories in the demystification and deflation of every great conductor under the sun. The fact, however, remains that it is harder to conduct than it is to write about conductors.
Particularly deviant are Lebrecht’s criticisms of Maestro Szpilman, in a 2002 article entitled “The Real [sic] Szpilman Revealed.” Consider the following utterances:

Whether he was a good, bad or moderate musician is immaterial to his story.

No, in fact, it was perfectly material. Here is a man who was so respected that Jews and Gentiles alike rallied to his defense. Would they have done this for just anyone? What made Szpilman stand out among the millions and millions of other Jews who faced the same fate? Obviously (at least, it would be obvious to one with a rational and healthy mind), Szpilman was a special person with a special talent.

The composer Andrzej Panufnik … failed to mention [Szpilman] either in his memoirs, or (his widow tells me) in any of their conversations. Reich-Ranicki, who knew Szpilman in the ghetto, likewise omits him from his memoirs. … None [of the other important Polish musicians] made public acknowledgement of his contribution, if any, to their careers.

Lebrecht began his article by saying, “In classical music, you’ve got to be dead to be good. Only two or three composers at any given time achieve posterity while alive. The rest go gently into that good night, praying for posthumous recognition.” Why, then, does Lebrecht contradict himself by gloating over his inability to find contemporary kudos for Szpilman? How much contemporary kudos did J. S. Bach garner? As a keyboardist, some. As a composer? Yet another case of Lebrecht’s illogic and his obsession with desecration.

Szpilman did not achieve individual renown. He appears to have been a man with no shadow.

J. S. Bach was not renowned until Mendelssohn revived the St. Matthew Passion 77 years after Bach’s death. Shadows are not always contemporaneous with the people who cast them.
     On the other hand, movies tend not to be made about critics’ lives! That’s why criticism contains more ax-grinding than aural discernment.

Musical evidence has begun to emerge from the archives of Polish Radio revealing Szpilman as an artist of ironic refinement and restrained muscularity.

The evidence does not reveal this. It reveals a musician of the highest order, a Golden Age style composer-musician who seems not to have lost a thing despite six years (!) away from his craft. All that should be there is there: a well-grounded technique, a singing melody, an ear for voicing the harmony, an understanding of the structure of the music, all unified by God-given style and taste.

[The] two tapes of the Chopin Nocturne in C-sharp minor … avoid bombast, triumphalism or sentimentality.

Is that piece bombastic, triumphal, or sentimental? Perhaps, then, Szpilman was a good interpreter.

The pianist can almost be heard to smile when there was nothing to smile about.

No, it is Lebrecht who inappropriately smiles. An autographical observation!

In the ubiquitous Rachmaninov Prelude in G-sharp he makes no attempt to compete with the fingerpower of Russian masters, but tosses the piece off with nearcasual panache.

Incorrect. Szpilman does have fingerpower, which is why the piece sounds “easy.” How Szpilman maintained that fingerpower during those six unspeakable years shall remain one of the great mysteries of pianism.

[The] Sony Classical disc that comes out this week [is] a testament to a shy executant.

Shy? Why, because in Chopin’s Nocturnes he doesn’t pour gasoline into the piano and throw a matchin? Szpilman is one of the only pianists in history to capture Chopin’s dreamy introversion. Or do you prefer Rubinstein’s jaded versions that reek of debauchery?

The most interesting discovery on the disc is Szpilman’s own music… (etc.)

Typical critic behavior: Disarm the reader with a seemly complimentary sentence, then whip out the condescension.

In the ghetto he composed a Gershwin-like concertino for piano and orchestra, astonishingly cocky in the deadly circumstances.

Cocky? Here Lebrecht is making two ridiculous comments – one, that Gershwin’s music is cocky, two, that Szpilman’s is. Is any music that is “lighter” than Beethoven’s somehow brash? And what is the relevance of world events? In 1937 America was in a depression, the world was at the brink of war, and Cole Porter suffered an accident that would eventually result in amputation. That didn’t stop him from writing songs like Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love, From Now On, and Get Out Of Town. Should he somehow not have been allowed to write light-hearted songs at that time?

Naggingly persistent, [the Concertino] is not a particularly likeable piece but it lodges in the ear like a grommet. It’s one of those pieces you find yourself humming and wonder where it’s from.

Typical mentality of the 20th-century music critic: If a piece is popular, it must not be good. So if the piece didn’t stay in one’s ear, would it then qualify as a masterpiece?

In a year or two, Szpilman’s music will be played no more than Górecki’s.

An easy statement to make, because in a year or two no one will remember Lebrecht’s review in order to refute it.

Leonardo Ciampa
( http://www.leonardociampa.com/Szpilman.html ) 2 February 2004

Copyright © MMIV Leonardo A. Ciampa. All rights reserved.