The café 'Sztuka i Moda', located next to today’s Hotel Victoria, was the most famous meeting place for Warsaw’s artistic elite during the Nazi occupation. Witold Lutosławski and Andrzej Panufnik played there as a piano duo during the years 1941-43.

Our constantly expanding repertoire soon encompassed works from Bach and Mozart, through to Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy and Ravel, then to more complex twentieth-century music such as Szymanowski and Stravinsky. Szymanowski, being Polish, was blacklisted, but this encouraged rather than prevented us from performing our version of his ballet, Harnasie, and one of his violin concertos.