Arianna savall biography
Arianna Savall
Arianna Savall is practiced in a wide variety of styles and is fluent in at least five languages. The daughter of Jordi Savall and his soprano wife, Montserrat Figueras, Savall was born in Basel, Switzerland and studied piano and harp at first. 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, however, she had already become interested in early music, taking courses at the Toulouse Conservatory with Norwegian lutenist Rolf Lislevand. After further studies at Schola Cantorum Basiliensis Savall built her reputation as an artistic force independent of her famous family.
Savall has performed throughout Europe, Scandinavia, the United States, South America, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, Turkey, Russia, Canada and Israel.
Since 2009, Savall has often performed and recorded with her partner, Norwegian musician Petter Udland Johansen, in the group Hirundo Maris.
Biography Arianna Savall & Petter Udland Johansen
Arianna Savall, born in Switzerland, studied in Basel and Terrassa. She began studying early music performance practise with Rolf Lislevand at the Toulouse Conservatory in 1992. Between 1996 and 2001 she returned to Schola Cantorum Basiliensis for postgraduate studies in singing with Kurt Widmer and historical harp studies with Heidrun Rosenzweig, and in 2006/7 studied Spanish baroque harp with Andrew Lawrence-King in Barcelona. She made her debut as singer of baroque opera in Basel in 2000 performing the “Opera Seria” of Florian Leopold Gassman. This was followed in 2002 by a highly successful Barcelona production of Moneverdi’s “Orfeo” directed by Jordi Savall, with Arianna as Eurydice. Her recordings with the Savall family and with Hespèrion XXI ensemble have received numerous awards. Arianna’s own albums for Alia Vox include “Bella Terra” (2003) and “Peiwoh” (2009), the latter also with contributions from Hirundo Maris’s Petter Udland Johansen and David Mayoral.
Petter Udland Johansen was born in Oslo, where he received his first voice and instrumental training. He graduated from the Norges Musikhøyskole, studying voice with Ingrid Bjoner and Svein Bjørkøy in 1996 and from Basel’s Schola Cantorum with Richard Levitt in 2000, making also additional studies with the tenor Hans Peter Blochwitz. His operatic and concert repertoire of classical music includes the works of Bach, Monteverdi, Mozart, and Mendelssohn as well as songs by Schubert, Grieg, Wolf, Mahler and Brahms. He has worked with conductors including Rinaldo Alessandrini, Jordi Savall, Pep Prats, Christer Løvold, Tom and Tobias Kjellum Gossmann. Groups with which he has given concerts and recordings include Sagene Ring, Capella Antiqua Bambergensis, Pratum Musicum, La Morra, Ferarra and Lucidarium. Together with Christer Løvold and Mark B. Lay, he founded the vocal trio Pechrima.
Arianna Savall
Born 1972, Basel, Switzerland
Arianna Savall, who was born in Basle (Switzerland) in 1972 into a family of Catalan musicians, began her piano studies with Susanne Hockenios, and classical-harp studies with Magdalena Barrera. In 1991, she also began singing lessons with Maria Dolors Aldea at the music school in Terrassa, where she completed her singing and harp studies.
She began studying the performance of music from earlier periods with Rolf Lislevand at the Toulouse Conservatory (France) in 1992, and joined a number of other courses taught by Andrew Lawrence-King, Hopkinson Smith, and her parents Montserrat Figueras and Jordi Savall.
Between 1996 and 2001, she went back to Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland for postgraduate studies in singing with Kurt Widmer, while also specializing in historical-harp playing with Heidrun Rosenzweig. She sang in a baroque opera for the first time in the Theater Basel in 2000: the "Opera Seria" (Vienna 1769) by Florian Leopold Gassman, with Carlos Harmuch conducting.
2002 - saw her debut in the Barcelona opera house, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, in a production of Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo directed by her father Jordi Savall, in which she took the role of Eurydice. That performance of the opera was recorded on DVD for the BBC and Opus Arte, and the critics praised the production as one of the most beautiful and magical versions of Orfeo. She performed in this opera at highly prestigious festivals and opera houses, including Edinburgh, Bordeaux, Bremen, Vienna, Milan, Madrid and Brussels.
She played the role of Casilda in the opera "Arianna", a pasticcio by Handel, in Basel's Teatre Scala, as well as performing as a singer and harpist in the opera "Sueños y Folías" in the Teatro Liceo in Salamanca, and singing in "Celos aún del ayre matan", an opera by Juan Hidalgo, in the Auditori in Barcelona and the Konzerthaus in Vienna. Sh
Arianna Savall
Arianna Savall i Figueras (born 1972 in Basel, Switzerland) is a Swiss-born Spanish classical singer, harpist and composer. She sings in Catalan, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese and other languages.
Life and career
Savall is the daughter of composer and viol player Jordi Savall and the late singer Montserrat Figueras, and the sister of Ferran Savall. She studied voice at the Conservatory of Terrassa with María Dolores Aldea in 1993. She graduated in harp from the Conservatory of Terrassa, Spain, in 1996, and obtained a degree in voice in 2000. In 1992, she began studying with Rolf Lislevand at the Toulouse Conservatory.
In 1996, Savall returned to Switzerland and attended a seminar led by Kurt Widmer at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. She has been a member of Hespèrion XXI and was part of her father's musical groups until 2008, when she created her own group Hirundo Maris, together with the Norwegian musician Petter Udland Johansen. In 2017 she began teaching baroque harp at the Zurich University of the Arts.
Discography
- Bella Terra, 2003
- Peiwoh (Alia Vox) 2009
- Chants du Sud et du Nord, 2012
- Le Labyrinthe d'Ariane, 2020