Arianna Savall, who was born in Basle (Switzerland) in 1972 into a family of Catalan musicians, began her classical-harp studies with Magdalena Barrera, and alongside that she also began her singing studies with Maria Dolors Aldea in 1991 in 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 in the Toulouse music school (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.

In 1996 she went back to the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland for postgraduate studies in singing with Kurt Widmer, while also undertaking specialist studies 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.

Also in 2002, 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 been performing in public concerts and recordings with the ensemble Hespèrion XXI since 1997, including her first recording: she played the harp to accompany her mother in "Tonos Humanos" by José Marín (Alia Vox), in a recording that was awarded a "Diapason d'Or".

She has taken part in numerous recordings for Alia Vox as a singer and as a harpist. Among her more recent releases are "Don Quijote", which was unanimously voted "Record of the year" (Midem Classical Awards 2006); her first recording performing with her family "Du temps et de l'instant", a finalist in the SGAE Spanish authors' association awards in 2005; and "Lux Feminae", the latest release from Montserrat Figueras. Alongside that, she has also been working with other groups: with Mala Punica in "Helas Avril" (ERATO); with the Ricercar Consort in "Sopra la Rosa" (MIRARE); with Rolf Lislevand in "Alfabeto" (NAÏVE); with Pedro Estevan in "El aroma del tiempo" (GLOSSA); with Desiderio in "Jouissance vous donneray" (AELUS); with LA FENICE, singing as a soloist in Monteverdi's Vespers; and singing in the concert devoted to M.A. Charpentier in Versailles in 2004, which was recorded for MEZZO, and in Buxtehude's "Membra Jesu" in Graz (Austria).

Arianna Savall Figueras has performed in Europe, Scandinavia, the United States, South America, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Israel. Her passion for early music and for improvisation have led her to the other extreme: contemporary music, in which she has begun working closely with the Swiss composer Conrad Steinmann on reconstructed ancient Greek music and the poems of Sappho. The outcome of that work is a disc that was warmly welcomed by the critics: "Melpomen" (HARMONIA MUNDI).

Rolf Lislevand's latest recording is a highly experimental venture: "Nuove musiche" (ECM2006), in which Arianna Savall Figueras featured as a singer and harpist. In June 2006 in Tallinn she sang in a performance of the work "Lijnen", for soprano and nine modern instruments, by the Estonian composer Helena Tulve (1972), and she has just recorded that work for ECM with the Nyyd Ensemble conducted by Olari Elts. A number of further projects are planned with Helena Tulve, for first performance late in 2006.

All her explorations as a singer and harpist are brought together in her first solo recording: "Bella Terra" (ALIA VOX), in which she performs her own compositions, and she is busy performing in many festivals with her group, including the "Sfinks" world music festival (Belgium, 2004) and the "Stimmenfestspiele" (Switzerland, 2005). Singing while accompanying oneself on the harp is an age-old tradition, and Arianna Savall Figueras is fascinated by the challenge of bringing it back through early music and new creative work in music. She is currently taking a postgraduate course with Andrew Lawrence-King at the ESMUC (Barcelona's Higher School of Music) on the Spanish baroque harp.