The soprano Nuria Rial studied piano and singing in her native Catalonia before joining Kurt Widmer’s class at the Basel Academy of Music. In 2003 she won the Helvetia Patria Jeunesse Foundation Prize in Lucerne. As a concert singer, she has worked with conductors such as Giovanni Antonini, Fabio Bonizzoni, Gianluca Capuano, Laurence Cummings, Teodor Currentzis, Laurence Equilbey, Iván Fischer, Paul Goodwin, Thomas Hengelbrock, René Jacobs, Gustav Leonhardt, Marc Minkowski and Trevor Pinnock, as well as with ensembles including the Accademia del Piacere, the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, the J. S. Bach Foundation St Gallen, the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, Café Zimmermann, Concerto Köln, Il Giardino Armonico, Il Pomo d’Oro, Insula orchestra, the Basel Chamber Orchestra, Les Musiciens du Louvre and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century.
Alongside her concert activities Nuria Rial also appears regularly on the operatic stage. Her roles in European opera productions include Eritea in Cavalli’s Eliogabalo at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Euridice in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at the Berlin State Opera and Pamina in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa. In 2012 she sang the role of Nuria in Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar at the Teatro Real in Madrid, directed by Peter Sellars.
Nuria Rial has worked extensively in Baroque music and established herself as an expert in historical performance practice. A keen chamber musician, she works in partnership with ensembles such as Il Pomo d’Oro, Café Zimmermann and the Nash Ensemble. Her song recital programmes feature both French and Spanish repertoire, along with German lieder.
She has recorded numerous CDs for various labels, and won many awards. In 2009 she received two ECHO Klassik awards: for the album Haydn: Arie per un’amante with the Orfeo Baroque Orchestra (as young singer of the year), and for the CD Teatro d’Amore with Philippe Jaroussky, Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata. In 2010 she won an ECHO Klassik Award for Via Crucis, also with L’Arpeggiata, and in 2012 another for Telemann with the Basel Chamber Orchestra. In 2020 she received the OPUS Klassik in the category ‘solo vocal recording’ for her album Muera Cupido, which she recorded with Fahmi Alqhai and the Accademia del Piacere. Nuria Rial has been an exclusive artist with Sony Classical since January 2009.
