He learned both Western music and Kandyan traditional drumming in Sri Lanka early in life, and studied cello in Italy from age 11, and further in England and with Pablo Casals in Puerto Rico.

De Saram became fascinated with contemporary music in 1972, when he performed Nomos Alpha for solo cello by Iannis Xenakis.

Both as a soloist and with the quartet he performed world premieres and recorded new music; he collaborated with influential composers, beginning with Kodály, Poulenc and Shostakovich.

[1][2] His father, Robert de Saram, who trained as a lawyer,[3] and his mother, Miriam Pieris Deraniyagala, a dancer,[2] had met and married in England.

Within a year, Rohan played his first public concert, at the Grand Oriental Hotel in 1950 to an audience including Viscount Soulbury and the first prime minister, D. S.

[4] In 1955 at the age of 16, he was the first winner of the Guilhermina Suggia Award, enabling him to study in the UK with Sir John Barbirolli and in Puerto Rico with Casals.

[2] At the invitation of Dimitri Mitropoulos,[3] de Saram performed at Carnegie Hall in 1960 with the New York Philharmonic,[5][6] playing Khachaturian's Cello Concerto conducted by Stanisław Skrowaczewski.

[3][6] He performed with major orchestras of Europe, US, Canada, Australia and the former Soviet Union with conductors such as Barbirolli, Sir Adrian Boult, Colin Davis, Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa, Malcolm Sargent and William Steinberg, among others.

[5] He ventured into contemporary music first when he was requested to play Nomos Alpha for solo cello by Iannis Xenakis for a Dutch broadcaster.

He worked personally with composers Luciano Berio, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Philip Glass, Sofia Gubaidulina György Ligeti, Wolfgang Rihm, Sir William Walton and Xenakis.

[6][4] In ensemble or as a soloist, he premiered works by Berio, Bose, Benjamin Britten, Sylvano Bussotti, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Paul Hindemith, Mauricio Kagel, Ligeti's Racine 19, Conlon Nancarrow, Henri Pousseur, Jeremy Dale Roberts (Deathwatch Cello Concerto, written for de Saram), Alfred Schnittke,[7] Xenakis's Kottos[9] and Toshio Hosokawa (the concerto Chant for cello and orchestra).

[12] De Saram recorded Edmund Rubbra's Soliloquy for cello and orchestra, John Mayer's Ragamalas and Prabhanda, Xenakis' Kottos, Elliott Carter's Figment I and II, and works by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Peter Ruzicka, Gelhaar, Pröve and Steinke.

His 2011 releases include Harmonic Labyrinth with Preethi de Silva, and the first of two volumes of de Saram in Concert featuring Wigmore Hall performances of Kodaly's Sonata for Solo Cello (his score carries Kodaly's hand-written praise for his performance before the composer in May 1960), together with Rachmaninoff's Cello Sonata, in which he is accompanied by his brother Druvi.

He recorded Britten's Cello Suites, and a reviewer from Gramophone noted his "scrupulous attention to matters of dynamic gradation and tone colour" and described his interpretation as of "a distinctive character and a powerful dramatic impact" delivering "musical insights".