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.

Arianna Savall2002 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. She has also taken part as a soloist in The Fairy Queen by Henry Purcell with the Main Barockorchester Frankfurt, and has sung the role of Clorinda in Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda by C. Monteverdi with Les Concerts des Nations

Between 1997 and 2008, she performed and recorded on several occasions with the ensemble Hespèrion XXI and made her first recording, on the Alia Vox label: she played the harp to accompany her mother in “Tonos Humanos” by José Marín, which was awarded a “Diapason d’Or”.

Her most recent recorded performances can be heard on “Don Quixote”, which was unanimously voted “Record of the Year” (Midem Classical Awards 2006), “La Folia” and “Ninna Nanna”, “Diaspora Sefardí” (earning a Grammy nomination in 2001), which have won numerous awards, the album recorded with her family “Du temps et de l’instant”, a finalist in the SGAE music awards 2005, and “Lux Feminae”, the latest release from Montserrat Figueras.

Arianna Savall has performed throughout Europe, Scandinavia, the United States, South America, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, Turkey, Russia, Canada and Israel.