After a 2008 performance in Warsaw of a piano quintet by the Polish composer Szymon Laks (1901-1983), a woman approached the pianist to confide that she hadn’t had the pleasure of listening to Laks’s music for 50 years. On the previous occasion, she explained, she’d been in Paris with her late husband Władysław Szpilman—the composer and pianist who is the subject of Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning film, The Pianist (2002). The Szpilmans had been friendly with Laks after World War II, but had returned to Poland while Laks remained in Paris, his long-time adoptive home.