Richard Ratner is a Boston based composer, teacher and pianist. His teachers include John Lessard (composition) at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Menahem Pressler (piano), for whom he was the teaching
assistant at Indiana University for many years. He has served as a member of the piano faculty at the Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University, taught piano at the Conservatoires of Montbelliard and Belfort in France, and been a chamber music coach at Boston Conservatory. His compositions
have been performed across the U.S. by groups including the Avanti Ensemble, Solomania, Luminus, and the Bavarde Quartet.
Venues include Boston’s Jordan Hall, the Plymouth (Massachusetts) Chamber Music Festival, Musica Viva in Blacksburg, Virginia, and The Schubert Club in St Paul, Minnesota, which commissioned A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687 for soprano Dinah Bryant and pianist Daniel Blumenthal. In February, 2011 his Andante for Strings premiered at the Kennedy Center and was done a week later at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.
It has since enjoyed numerous performances across the US. In summer, 2012, his Todesfuge premiered in Prague’s Dvorak Hall