Anna Lucia Richter - About

It came as a complete surprise to me that I was nominated and I could hardly believe my good fortune when a BBT Award was offered 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.

Equally at home on the opera stage, on the concert platform and in the recording studio, German mezzo-soprano Anna Lucia Richter is lauded for her performances of Mahler with the likes of Bernard Haitink and Iván Fischer, her lieder recitals and her dramatic presence on stage. Her repertoire encompasses a huge range from Monteverdi to Heinz Holliger – both important to her BBT projects – and everything in between, especially Bach and Schubert lieder.

When Anna Lucia became a BBT Award winner she was a soprano, but later she became a mezzo-soprano – a transition announced to the world beyond her BBT-supported critically acclaimed recording of Monteverdi’s Il delirio della passione (Pentatone). Alongside many practicalities necessary to pursuing an artistic career – equipping her music room with a piano and piano stool, renovating a harpsichord, purchasing new scores, Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch dictionary, a new laptop and updating her website with new photographs – Anna Lucia commissioned a new Schubert-inspired piece from Heinz Holliger, Reliquien. She also performed a London showcase concert and joined fellow BBT alumni in Perugia for a special concert to celebrate BBT’s 15th birthday, singing Schubert with Zoltán Fejérvári and Mendelssohn song arrangements by Aribert Reiman, with Zoltán and the Elias String Quartet.

Anna Lucia was supported with a BBT Award between 2016 and 2021.

For a current biography please visit ks-gasteig.de

Read a blog by Anna-Lucia, Landmark Monteverdi: Il delirio della passione, here

Press Release: Monteverdi Il delirio della passione

Photographs by Ammial Bushakevitz and Kaupo Kikkas