Warsaw Philharmonic – Home of the Chopin Competition

Why is it significant?

The broad, solemn building in front of you, with its tall windows and its stone facade, is the National Philharmonic. Every five years, in October, this hall becomes the most nerve-racking stage in the world of the piano.

Key Facts

Open the walk

The broad, solemn building in front of you, with its tall windows and its stone facade, is the National Philharmonic. Every five years, in October, this hall becomes the most nerve-racking stage in the world of the piano.

The Philharmonic first opened on the fifth of November 1901, and the soloist at its inaugural concert was Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the same pianist whose name you met at Hotel Bristol. The original building, modelled on grand European concert halls, was destroyed in the war. What stands here now is its post-war reconstruction, which reopened in 1955, simpler and heavier, with the sober grandeur of that decade.

In 1927 a pianist and teacher named Jerzy Żurawlew founded a competition devoted entirely to Chopin, worried that young people were losing interest in him. The first winner was Lev Oborin from Moscow. Since then the International Chopin Piano Competition has crowned Maurizio Pollini in 1960, Martha Argerich in 1965 and Krystian Zimerman in 1975, and launched more careers than almost any contest on earth.

It has had its scandals, too. In 1980 the jury eliminated the flamboyant Yugoslav pianist Ivo Pogorelić before the final, and Martha Argerich, by then a juror, walked out in protest, calling him a genius. The prize that year went to Dang Thai Son from Vietnam, but Pogorelić left Warsaw a star. During competition weeks, taxi drivers and grandmothers follow the rounds on the radio and argue about tempo like football fans about a penalty.

And there is a quiet symmetry in the calendar. Chopin died on the seventeenth of October 1849, and the competition always unfolds in October, so each edition turns into a month-long remembrance in sound. From the boy at the Visitationist organ to the pianists sweating in the final round here, the walk ends where his music keeps living. The city centre and the Palace of Culture are a few minutes south, if you want to carry the tune a little further.