Ahead of its first performance in English, British director Neil Bartlett discusses the place of music when there are no more words left to speak. On the pianists鈥淢ikhail has brought together two elements that you would never think could be; a live performance of pieces written by Chopin, some of the most beautiful music ever written for the piano, and pages from Wladyslaw鈥檚 Szpilman鈥檚 memoirs. 鈥淲ladyslaw lived through the worst years of the Warsaw ghetto and you would not think that words describing the most terrible thing and music so beautiful could inhabit the same space.
 | | Neil Bartlett (Pic:Camilla Broadbent) |
鈥淚鈥檇 heard about Polanski鈥檚 film but I hadn鈥檛 seen it. Although I was vaguely aware of the story, nothing prepared me for the shock of actually reading the book. It was so vivid, so intimate and so insistent that in real life these two things did co-exist. 鈥淚n the very final sequence, when he is dying of starvation and unsure as to whether or not he will survive to see the liberation of his city, he describes that the thing that kept him alive was playing by memory all the Chopin pieces that had been in his life as a concert pianist for the radio in pre-war Warsaw. It was that collision of images that attracted me as an artist to telling the piece. 鈥淢ikhail has created something quite extraordinary. When you are close to a classical pianist, you feel somehow that the pianist is channelling very private emotions through this music. | "He describes that the thing that kept him alive was playing by memory all the Chopin pieces that had been in his life as a concert pianist." | | Neil Bartlett |
鈥淵ou feel in order to make the piano sing like that, you must know what this music is about, but of course, we can never know. We don鈥檛 know what Chopin meant when he wrote those pieces and none of us can know what Mikhail feels when he is playing, but you feel he has the right to play this music and the right to speak about the piece. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 ever say, I am Szpilman, I know how it feels. None of us can know how it felt, but I would say that it is more about bearing witness to the emotions of the originators of the piece.鈥 | 
