Biography (read more)
Adam Harasiewicz was born on 1 July 1932 in Chodzież, Poland. He came to the piano relatively late by prodigy standards, beginning lessons at ten after a brief two-month experiment with the violin, and won first prize at a contest in Rzeszów at fifteen. At eighteen he entered the State Higher School of Music in Kraków, now the Academy of Music in Kraków, where he studied for six years with Zbigniew Drzewiecki.
His career turned on a single event. In 1955 he won first prize at the fifth International Chopin Piano Competition. He afterwards spent a period in Belgium before settling in Austria, from where he pursued an international concert career. He has returned to the Chopin Competition as a member of its jury in 1995, 2010, 2015 and 2021.
Harasiewicz is regarded above all as a Chopin interpreter, a reputation founded on the 1955 competition victory and sustained by a recorded traversal of Chopin’s complete works. He has been described as pre-eminent in that repertoire through a combination of technical command, lyrical imagination and an unusual consistency of standard, qualities better suited to a long recording project than to the concert circuit’s habit of a handful of showpieces.
Beyond Chopin he has recorded substantial compositions by Karol Szymanowski, and his advocacy of both composers places him in a specifically Polish line of transmission running back through his teacher Zbigniew Drzewiecki. His repeated service on the Chopin Competition jury has extended that influence to the assessment of later generations of Chopin players.
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