In a concert of new American works inspired poetry and folk song, the New Amsterdam Singers performed the New York premiere of Ronald Perera’s When Music Sounds. New Amsterdam Singers is an amateur chorus of 70+ skilled singers whose performances in New York City and abroad have won critical acclaim.
Ronald Perera (b. Boston 1941) was born in Boston on Christmas Day, 1941. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in music from Harvard, where his principal composition teacher was Leon Kirchner. He also worked independently with Randall Thompson. Subsequently he spent a year on a John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship studying electronic music at the University of Utrecht. His more than seventy compositions include three operas, song cycles, chamber, choral and orchestral works and—in the early part of his career—several works which combine voices or instruments with electronically generated sounds.
He is especially known for his many text settings. Reviewing the recording of his cantata, The Outermost House, John Story of Fanfare magazine wrote: “Ronald Perera is among the finest living combiners of words and music.”
In Tune blog 