Polish National Philharmonic/De Wit, National Philharmonic Hall, Warsaw, Poland

The Polish pianist

Warsaw is in the grip of a mania – Szpilmania, to be precise. The face of Wladyslaw Szpilman stares out at you from bus stops. The papers are full of Szpilman articles. His family seem to be permanent fixtures on radio and TV. The excitement has been caused by Roman Polanski's film The Pianist, winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival in February and released this month in Poland (it opens in Britain later this year). It's based on Szpilman's gripping account of his survival of the Warsaw ghetto and his brushes with death in the bombed-out city. The book had made the bestseller lists by the time Szpilman died, aged 88, in 2000; Polanski survived the Krakow ghetto, and Szpilman's tale spoke directly to him.

This concert of Szpilman's compositions, which capped celebrations of the composer, illustrated the duality of his musical life. Having studied the piano with Schnabel and composition with Schreker, Szpilman was one of Poland's foremost classical pianists, spending 50 years on the concert platform, but for the harrowing interruption of his incarceration and flight. And yet his musical legacy is largely of lighter music: he composed some 450 popular songs, a selection of which, sung by Irena Santor, formed the second half of the concert.

The first half consisted of a bustling, neo-Classical Little Overture, the introduction from his score to the film Calls to My Wife, with soaring string melodies à la Mantovani, a Concertino for piano and orchestra, a Ballet Scene and an ironically sentimental Waltz in the Old Style – the sum total of his orchestral output.

The Concertino was written in 1940, in the teeth of the Nazi terror. But the bright and buoyant music betrays nothing of its origins: its blend of classical format and jazzy melodic inflection is Gershwin in the ghetto, the debt to the Rhapsody in Blue obvious.

A suite for solo piano from 1933, The Life of Machines, with pounding Bartokian figures in its first movement, a wistful central section, and sardonic, Prokofievan toccata-finale, preceded the Ballet Scene of 1948, a mix of more Gershwin and the Prokofiev of the Scythian Suite, with a soupçon of The Rite of Spring – stomping rhythms obscuring a sense of humour that popped its head up when allowed.

Wladyslaw Szpilman will become a household name when Polanski's film is released internationally. So it's a pity he wrote so little for his instrument. Still, the fetching melodies of those hundreds of songs have endeared themselves to the Poles, and we'll doubtless be hearing a lot of them over here, too.