Astre Records to Celebrate the Release of DEDICATION: ROGER PELTZMAN PLAYS CHOPIN with Concert, 1/5

On Sunday, January 5th at 5 pm, Astre Records will celebrate the release of the CD "Dedication: Roger Peltzman Plays Chopin" with a special CD Release Concert by Roger Peltzman at (le) poisson rouge, 158 Bleeker Street, New York. Tickets are $17 in advance here: and day of, $20.

The concert celebrates an artistic life cut short -that of Petlzman's Belgian uncle, Norbert Stern.

Stern, a Jew in Nazi-held Belgium, was a young pianist acclaimed in the press as "brilliant and full of promise." In 1942, as conditions worsened for the Jews, Norbert was compelled to leave the Brussels Conservatory of Musicwhere he had been a premier student winning a series of prestigious competitions. Soon thereafter he and his family were forced to go into hiding and hoped to wait out the war. But this was not to be. Two years later the Sterns were denounced and their hiding place discovered. The family, having first passed through the transit camp in Mechelen, Belguim, was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp and it was there, not long after, that Stern met his death at 21 years of age.

The CD "Dedication" is a tribute by Roger Peltzman to a brilliant performer he and the world would never know. The recording is an all-Chopin program, chosen to commemorate Norbert's particular love, and was recorded in the Brussels Conservatory of Music on the same stage where Norbert himself played. A beautiful and acoustically rich concert hall with its intimate connection to Norbert Stern, Peltzman chose The Conservatory as the most meaningful place to commemorate a young life lost and a talent tragically destroyed.

Roger Peltzman is a pianist and teacher in New York City. He has performed six solo concerts at Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall during the past 12 years. Peltzman is a faculty member at America's oldest community school of music in the country, New York's Third Street Music School Settlement founded in 1894.

Following the CD release in New York at (le) poisson rouge, that Roger Peltzman will also bring his celebration of Norbert Stern to his uncle's home country. On Wednesday, February 19th, Peltzman will play in the Belgian Holocaust Memorial, the Kazerne Dossin Museum that is located in the exact buildings that comprised the Mechelen transit camp through which Stern and his family passed.

"Dedication" is released by Astre Records. (Note: "Astre" is the name of Peltzman's grandfather's cosmetic company in Brussels).

For more information about "Dedication", visit: Rogerpeltzman.com and read here and here (New York Times article) about Peltzman's family.