Composers

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1965, Alfonso Tenreiro entered the world of music studying organ. He graduated from Indiana University with a degree in composition.

Ricardo Lorenz's compositions have received praise for their fiery orchestrations, harmonic sophistication, and rhythmic vitality. These impressions have accompanied performances of the Venezuelan-born composer's works at prestigious international festivals such as Carnegie Hall's Sonidos de las Amèricas, Ravinia Festival, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, France's Berlioz Festival, Spain's Festival Internacional de Musica Contemporanea de Alicante, the Festival Cervantino in Mexico, and many more. Lorenz's orchestral compositions have been performed domestically by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, New World Symphony, San Antonio Symphony, and the Dayton Philharmonic, and internationally by premier orchestras in Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Venezuela.

Donald Betts made his New York debut as a pianist and composer at the age of 21, playing his own music along with works by Prokofieff, Liszt, and Schumann. The New York Times called him "a pianist of imagination and poetic feeling". Musical America cited "his tremendous technique and bravura style".

Born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1931, Donald Martino began music lessons at nine ñ learning to play the clarinet, saxophone, and oboe ñ and composing at age 15. He went on to obtain degrees from Syracuse and Princeton Universities.

Ronald Perera’s (b. Boston 1941) compositions include operas, song cycles, chamber, choral, and orchestral works, and several works for instruments or voices with electronic sounds. He is perhaps best known for his settings of texts by authors as diverse as Dickinson, Joyce, Grass, Sappho, Cummings, Shakespeare, Francis of Assisi, Melville, Ferlinghetti, Updike and Henry Beston. Seven major pieces are represented on compact discs released in the late 1990s. Reviewing CRI CD 796 for Fanfare magazine, critic John Story writes, “Three Poems of Günter Grass is, quite simply, one of the most haunting works of the last 25 years.” Reviewing The Outermost House on Albany Troy 314 he writes, “When he is on form, Ronald Perera is among the finest living combiners of words and music…The music is simply lovely.”

Simon Proctor is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music where he gained the GRSM degree and LRAM diploma in piano performance and teaching. He won several prizes for composition, orchestration, and piano including the Eric Coates prize, the Academy’s top award for orchestral composition. As a pianist, he has given recitals in Germany, The Bahamas, and the United States and has appeared many times as a concerto soloist in the United Kingdom and America.