Anna Lucia Richter - Biography

Anna Lucia Richter was supported by BBT between 2016 and 2021. For an up-to-date biography please visit  www.ks-gasteig.de.

Anna Lucia Richter comes from a family of professional musicians, starting singing lessons with her mother Regina Dohmen at nine and becoming a long-standing member of Cologne Cathedral’s girls’ choir. She studied with Prof. Kurt Widmer, Basel and with Mrs. Prof. Klesie Kelly-Moog at the Musikhochschule Köln, graduating with honours in 2013. Further studies followed with Margreet Honig, Edda Moser, Christoph Prégardien and Edith Wiens. Her international awards include a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award in 2016.

On the concert platform, Anna Lucia Richter is a welcome guest at the Lucerne Festival, recently with both the Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Riccardo Chailly and Chamber Orchestra of Europe/Bernard Haitink/Christian Gerhaher. Other recent appearances include, at the BBC Proms, with the Budapest Festival Orchestra/Iván Fischer, with conductor Thomas Hengelbrock and both the Orchestre de Paris and the NDR Elbphilharmonie, the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecila/Daniel Harding, the London Symphony Orchestra/Bernard Haitink, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra/Paavo Järvi and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra/Jérémie Rhrorer.

Her operatic repertoire includes roles such as Ilia (Idomeneo), Zerlina (Don Giovanni) and the roles of Eurydice / La Musica in Monteverdi’s Orfeo in Sasha Waltz’s acclaimed production. In 2017 she had great success as Elisabeth Zimmerat the Theater an der Wien in Keith Warner’s new production of Henze’s Elegie für junge Liebenden.

Anna Lucia Richter is passionately fond of lieder, with a wide repertoire, performing in all major song centres, such as the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg, Rheingau Music Festival, Heidelberger Frühling and London’s Wigmore Hall.  She made her US debut with three recitals in New York’s Park Avenue Armory, accompanied by Gerold Huber, and gave another US recital in the Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall of Eichendorff settings and improvisations, accompanied by Michael Gees (repertoire also recorded on her debut solo CD on Channel Classics [CC72687, 2015]).  Her Pentatone debut, Heimweh [February 2019, PTC 5186 722] replicates repertoire first presented live in January 2019 with Gerold Huber at the Philharmonie Luxembourg, and also at the Konzerthaus Dortmund – also including the première performances of her BBT commission from Heinz Holliger, Reliquien – marked the the start of her three-year residency as Junge Wilde (‘Young Savage’).

It came as a complete surprise to me that I was nominated for the Borletti-Buitoni Trust and I could hardly believe my good fortune when it was really awarded to me. So many fantastic things occurred to me that it would allow me to do and, at first, it took me a long time to decide which dream I should fulfil first. Merely to have this background feeling of a certain kind of security and to be able to concentrate on one’s own artistic development, free of worry, is a huge gift. It is simply wonderful to have the advice and warm-hearted support from the Trust.

Photographs by Nafez Rerhuf / Matthias Baus