Mazurkas – Rubinstein

In 2002, 17-year-old Polish pianist Rafal Blechacz won second prize in the Artur Rubinstein Piano Competition in Bydgoszcz, Poland. The next year, he won first prize in the Fourth International Hamamatsu Piano Competition in Hamamatsu, Japan. The year after that he won the Grand Prix at the International Piano Competition in Rabat, Morocco. The year after that, however, Blechacz hit the quintfecta at the age of 20 by taking all five top prizes at the 15th International Frederick Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw: first prizes in polonaise, mazurka, sonata, and concerto, plus grand prize overall…

The Polish pianist Halina Czerny-Stefanska (1922 - 1982) enjoyed a more substantial reputation among piano buffs than among music-lovers in general until she was unexpectedly shot to prominence by a mistake that got her talked about all around the world. In the early 1950s she had performed the First Concerto of Chopin under Vaclav Smetacek in a recording issued by the Czech label Supraphon; when EMI reissued the performance in 1965 it was attributed to Dinu Lipatti, the Romanian pianist whose premature death in 1950 robbed classical music of one of its brightest stars.