United Kingdom Roger Peltzman, Dedication: Roger Peltzman (piano, narrator). Marylebone Theatre, London, 9.6.2023. (MB)

Roger Peltzman’s one-man present Dedication is directly a memorial to household murdered within the Holocaust; a mirrored image on trauma, each that of his mom, who escaped occupied Belgium, disguised as a nun, and his personal, of the New York second era; and a suggestion of how music would possibly assist, if by no means to heal issues which are by their nature unhealable, then to dwell with them. That, I believe, is Peltzman’s private declare; it has helped him or not less than been his companion. He rightly doesn’t make claims to universality; a post-Holocaust world has, fairly understandably, felt it can not and/or shouldn’t. It is a private testimony and all of the extra transferring – and stronger – for that.

It is usually, after all, a efficiency: an concept and actuality that body all that we see and listen to, and but which additionally provide alternative ways in for various audiences. Dialogue throughout the many years with the uncle he by no means knew, pianist and Chopin specialist Norbert Stern, turns into more and more the main target — or not less than it did for me. It moved Peltzman himself to check the piano and finally to make a Chopin recording, partly relived onstage within the right here and now, within the Brussels corridor during which Norbert had triumphed. There’s, each he and his trainer have been satisfied, a passage during which Peltzman’s efficiency so takes to the air that it ceases to be him and turns into Norbert. Of that they have been satisfied independently. Following that epiphany, we transfer to filmed footage of the laying down of Brussels Stolpersteine, in Peltzman’s presence, publicly to commemorate the Stern household. We will, after all, by no means share Peltzman’s trauma, but maybe we will start to grasp it – and even start to grasp traumas of our personal.

There was no doubting the numerous methods it had affected viewers members the night I attended: that is an hour to have one smile, cry, and assume, usually on the similar time.

Mark Berry