Chopin Barcarolle, Walter Gieseking

masterful.Each section judged&hisrubatosso wonderful not afraid to do what earlier styles and performers did. this is as fine as Rubin and Moisew best on disc. every detail here is savoured and the tonal palette is Geiseking .this is one of the great recorded performances of this piece and i didnt even know he rc ANY CHOPIN .
I love his tempi and changes.1928 recperf RubinI have is shallow sound uneasy feeling with tempi MUCH OVERRATED by SAchs -but whoamI

perfect then! do check out Cherkassky's rendition if this sounds 'rushed' to you. you'll love C's flow and walking rhytm.

In 2002 Filar co-authored a book about his life during and after World War II entitled "From Buchenwald to Carnegie Hall'. It is in this book that Walter Gieseking is quoted as telling his wife that he thought that Filar played this better than he did.

Filar studied with Gieseking for five years and toured all over Europe playing recitals and concerts.
He arrived in the United States in 1950. Invited to join the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Eugene Ormandy he performed regularly in Philadelphia with the Orchestra.
He debuted in Carnegie Hall on January 1, 1952. In 1992 he went to Poland where he played with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra once again.

Filar was from a Jewish family. He was imprisoned during the Second World War in seven different Nazi concentration camps. In the first death camp - Majdanek - he nearly died from malnutrition and infection. He narrowly escaped being sent to the gas chambers. After being liberated by the Polish Army he returned to the piano.
While playing recitals in Frankfurt, Germany, he went to Wiesbaden, Germany where he sought advice from the renowned German pianist, Walter Gieseking.

Marian Filar (b. 1917 in Warsaw) is a Polish concert pianist and virtuoso.
Filar began to study piano at the age of five, at six he gave his first recital at the Warsaw Conservatory as a wunderkind. When 12 years of age, he played Mozart's Concerto in D Minor with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. He gained the interest of Zbigniew Drzewiecki, the noted piano teacher at the Warsaw Conservatory with whom he studied until the outbreak of the Second World War.

While Gieseking plays this wonderfully, he considered his student, Marian Filar, to play it even better than he did.

Could you post some recordings of Filar?

Sorry "crd411", who is Marian Filar? Never heard about her. Could you give us please some more information?

I think this performance is wonderful! It's a mystery that Gieseking didn't play more Chopin--except, one of my teachers, Arminda Canteros, had worked with him briefly while he was in Argentina--he apparently told her that he didn't like the reception his Chopin got from critics, so he dropped it from his repertoire! And yet there is so much beauty here--the way he gets the rhythm of the gondola, his rubato, and the "dolce sfogato" is magical! I love his filigree and the way he ends the piece