Halina Czerny-Stefańska was born in Kraków on 31 December 1922. She studied first with her father, Stanisław Szwarcenberg-Czerny, then with Alfred Cortot at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, and later with Józef Turczyński and Zbigniew Drzewiecki in Warsaw.

In 1949 she was joint winner of the first prize at the fourth International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, sharing it with Bella Davidovich. She went on to sit for many years on the juries of the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition, the International Tchaikovsky Competition, the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition and the Chopin Competition itself.

She was active in public life in Kraków, serving as a city councillor from 1976 to 1984 and as a member of the social committee for the restoration of the city’s monuments from 1978 to 1985, and holding positions in several national organisations during the early 1980s. She was married to the pianist Ludwik Stefański; their daughter, Elżbieta Stefańska-Łukowicz, born in 1943, is a harpsichordist and a professor at the Academy of Music in Kraków. She died in Kraków on 1 July 2001, aged 78.

Czerny-Stefańska is identified almost entirely with Chopin. Her repertoire was restricted to few composers beyond him, and even within Chopin it was not large: she did not perform the E minor concerto in public until 1951 and never played the F minor.

The episode her name is most often attached to concerns that concerto. In 1966 EMI issued a recording of the Chopin E minor concerto as the work of Dinu Lipatti. After a BBC broadcast and a listener’s query in 1981, tests established that the soloist was in fact Czerny-Stefańska, in a Supraphon recording made in 1955 with the Czech Philharmonic under Václav Smetáček, and the misattributed issue was withdrawn. The case is cited as one of the clearest instances of a recorded performance being credited to the wrong pianist for years.

She recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, His Master’s Voice, Polskie Nagrania Muza, Supraphon, RCA-Japan and Telefunken, in music by Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Paderewski, Grieg, Szymanowski and Zarębski.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halina_Czerny-Stefa%C5%84ska
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halina_Czerny-Stefa%C5%84ska