Arianna Savall

Born into a family steeped in early music, Arianna Savall has followed a path reminiscent of her father, the gambist and ensemble leader Jordi Savall, by focusing on Renaissance repertoire while embracing works from many periods and cultures. She moves with ease among numerous stylistic idioms and commands at least five languages.

Arianna Savall i Figueras, daughter of Jordi Savall and the soprano Montserrat Figueras, entered the world in Basel, Switzerland, in 1972. She began with piano and harp lessons, the latter under Magdalena Barrera. Her childhood unfolded partly in her parents’ native Catalonia and partly on extensive travels. At the Terrassa Conservatory she completed a vocal diploma in 1996 and a harp diploma in 2000. Her engagement with early music began earlier: in 1992 she attended classes at the Toulouse Conservatory given by lutenist Rolf Lislevand, who had recently worked with Jordi Savall on the widely noticed soundtrack to Tous les matins du monde; she also worked with Hopkinson Smith and Andrew Lawrence-King, while her parents remained central influences.

Between 1996 and 2001 she pursued studies in historical harp performance at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. During those years she made her operatic stage debut at Theater Basel in an opera by the Classical composer Florian Leopold Gassmann. In 2002 she sang the title role of Eurydice in a production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo mounted by Jordi Savall at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu. The following year she issued her first recording, Sopra la Rosa, with the Ricercar Consort on the Mirare label.

The touring European success of that Orfeo staging helped establish Savall as an independent artist. She has taken the role of Casilla in Handel’s pasticcio Arianna, appeared in a concert version of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen with the Main Baroque Orchestra of Frankfurt, and contributed both voice and harp to her father’s anthology program Sueños y Folias. She has recorded extensively as harpist and singer, sometimes alongside Jordi Savall on his Alia Vox imprint and sometimes elsewhere; her own 2003 album Bella Terra, containing original compositions, reached 30,000 copies.

Since 2009 she has frequently collaborated with her partner, the musician Petter Udland Johansen, in the ensemble Hirundo Maris. Their 2018 release Silent Night, a survey of early Christmas music, appeared on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi. In 2021 she issued the solo harp album Le Labyrinthe d’Ariane on Alia Vox and, with Hirundo Maris, the Fuga Libera disc Poésie et musique. Two years later the pair released El cant de la Sibil.la, Draumkvedent on the Carpe Diem label, presenting medieval oral-tradition repertory from Catalonia and Norway. Savall teaches Baroque harp at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste.