Rohan de Lanerolle: Baritone
Rohan de Lanerolle studied with Kalasuri Lylie Godridge and with Russel Bartholomeusz at St. Thomas’s College, Colombo, in Sri Lanka. At St. Thomas’, Rohan was awarded Best Performer’s Awards for singing and for acting, playing Lt. Joseph Cable in South Pacific in 1994. In the same year, he made his solo debut with the Sri Lanka Philharmonic Pops Orchestra; he is now one of the country’s leading young singers. His performances have ranged from opera (Marullo: Verdi, Rigoletto: Sri Lanka Philharmonic Players, 1995), through musicals (The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Showboat, lead role as Narrator: Blood Brothers, 1997), to oratorio and solo singing with orchestra.
In 1996 he was invited to Singapore as guest soloist for the Christmas Service at St. Andrew’s Cathedral, where he now appears frequently; he has also sung solos in Bach’s Magnificat (1997), Devar Suriya Sena, Sinhala Liturgy and the first performances of Lalanath de Silva, Requiem Orbis Terrarum (1999) and Pradeep Ratnayake, Indrakeelaya (2000), Saint-Saëns Christmas Oratorio (2000), and Fauré Requiem (2000) with the Symphony Orchestra of Sri Lanka, and gave the first performance of Jonathan Clarke’s cantata Lament to critical acclaim with the Christ Church Festival Orchestra in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, in 2001. He studies regularly in London with Kenneth Woolam, professor of singing at the Royal College of Music and has recently completed his first recording accompanied by Rohan de Silva of New York’s Julliard School of Music, with whom he performed in Chicago in 2003.