Like her father, gambist and ensemble director Jordi Savall, singer and harpist Arianna Savall has specialized in Renaissance music but has performed pieces from a wide range of eras and traditions. Savall is competent in a wide variety of styles and is fluent in at least five languages. The daughter of Jordi Savall and his wife, soprano Montserrat Figueras, Arianna Savall i Figueras was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1972. She studied piano and harp at first; her harp teacher was Magdalena Barrera. Savall grew up partly in her parents' home region of Catalonia in Spain but also traveled extensively. She studied voice at the Terrassa Conservatory in Catalonia, finishing a voice degree there in 1996 and a harp degree in 2000. By that time, she had already become interested in early music, taking courses at the Toulouse Conservatory with lutenist Rolf Lislevand in 1992 (the previous year, he had been Jordi Savall's collaborator on the breakout soundtrack to the film Tous les matins du monde); she also took classes with Hopkinson Smith and Andrew Lawrence-King, and both her parents were major influences. From 1996 to 2001, Savall studied early harp playing in her hometown at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. By the time she completed that program, she had made her operatic debut at the Theater Basel in an opera by the Classical-period composer Florian Leopold Gassmann. In 2002, Savall appeared in the lead role of Eurydice in a production of Monteverdi's Orfeo, directed by Jordi Savall at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, a major opera house. She made her recording debut the following year with the Ricercar Consort on the Mirare label, releasing the album Sopra la Rosa. Critically acclaimed, the Orfeo production went on the road to theaters and festivals across Europe and built Savall's reputation as an artistic force independent of her famous family. She has sung the role of Casilla in the Handel pasticcio Arianna, appeared in a concert production of Purcell's The Fairy Queen with the Main Baroque Orchestra of Frankfurt, and has both sung and played harp in the Jordi Savall anthology program Sueños y Folias. She has performed as a harpist and singer on various albums, both with and without Jordi Savall and both on his Alia Vox label and elsewhere. Her 2003 release, Bella Terra, featuring her own compositions, sold an impressive 30,000 copies. Since 2009, Savall has often performed and recorded with her partner, musician Petter Udland Johansen, in the group Hirundo Maris. In 2018, the pair appeared on Silent Night, a collection of early Christmas music released on the major Deutsche Harmonia Mundi label. Savall returned in 2021 with the harp album Le Labyrinthe d'Ariane on Alia Vox and with Hirundo Maris on the Fuga Libera album Poésie et musique. In 2023, she joined Johansen on the Carpe Diem label with the album El cant de la Sibil.la, Draumkvedent, featuring medieval oral-tradition works from Catalonia and Norway. Savall is on the faculty at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, teaching Baroque harp. ~ James Manheim, Rovi

Arianna Savall

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