(Image source from: Music of the Holocaust Turns Alive!})

Nicholas Biniaz-Harris is a young American classical pianist who is more at home performing Bach, Beethoven as well as Rachmaninoff than the ambiguous works of Nazi concentration camp inmates. On the contrary as the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, the 17-year-old Washingtonian felt a special attachment to the variations on a Polish patriotic theme that Leon Kaczmarek kept collectively in Dachau during World War II.

On Tuesday, subsequent to just two weeks of rehersal, he sat down at a baby grand piano in an auditorium at the United States (US) State Department in Washington at the same time played

Kaczmarek's composition to American ears for the first time. The winner of this year's National Symphony Orchestra young soloists competition expressed that being a classically-trained pianist, you are always playing pieces that the audience or judges or teachers have heard a thousand times preceding.

(AW:Samrat Biswas)