My father was a banker, but he was an independent spirit. He was a very good pianist and very much into music.
My father was a classical pianist, and my mother was a singer of just about everything.
For the longest time, I wanted to become a pianist. That was kinda my thing.
My mother was a classical pianist and my stepfather was an industrialist who was passionate about composing contemporary music.
I was for a minor amount of time but I was probably a better pianist at 15 than I am now.
It is my fervent wish and my greatest ambition to leave a work with a few useful instructions for the pianists after me.
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes ah, that is where the art resides.
The people who raised me musically are my mother, who is a classically trained pianist, and my stepfather.
Wladyslaw Szpilman: I love to see a woman playing the cello.
I wanted to be a veterinarian until I saw a video of a vet performing surgery on a dog. Then I decided I wanted to be a pianist.
Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it.
The pianist Cecil Taylor is extremely melodic; the guitarist Derek Bailey is extremely melodic, and Ornette Coleman.
I wanted to be a concert pianist at Carnegie Hall; that is what I wanted to do from really early on.
I come from a wonderful family. My mother was a pianist and my father was a salesman. They were very middle-class, very middle-Western.
There were two things I used to do to seduce girls: jokes and music. Since I'm not a great pianist, jokes were my thing.
Wladyslaw Szpilman: Its too small. There's 400,000 of us in Warsaw. Henryk Szpilman: No, there's 360,000. So it will be easy.
Father: Well, to tell you the truth, I thought it would be worse.
Wladyslaw Szpilman: What does my tie have to do with anything? I need it for work.
When a little more than a teenager, I was a piano-bar pianist in the land where I was born and raised, Tuscany.
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides.
You hear the same work by different orchestras, different conductors, violinists, pianists, singers, and slowly, the work reveals itself and begins to live deeper in you.
