Biography
Hans-Jürg Rickenbacher, born in Biel/Bienne, studied singing, guitar and music teaching at the Hochschule für Musik der Stadt Basel. After the Swiss Opera Studio he received various study prizes and important singing impulses from Wally Stämpfli, Barbara Locher, Malcolm Walker and Nicolaï Gedda. His broad repertoire has always covered the opera, oratorio and lied sections equally and ranges from Monteverdi to contemporary music. Numerous appearances at the Lucerne Theatre and in Lucerne's churches and concert halls link him to the city of music. Guest appearances have brought him to many theatres, opera houses and concert halls throughout Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, to renowned orchestras with renowned conductors and directors. In the “largest concert hall in the world”, the Amazon basin on Ecuador's Rio Napo, he spent an entire year with his family at a jungle school. The acoustic universe of the rainforest is like a view into the starry sky that reaches far behind our history. Singing and singing lessons can give voice to this image and, as Goethe says, give our children what is most important: Roots and wings. From 1999 to 2022 he taught at the Musik-Akademie Basel and since 2010 he has been a lecturer in solo singing at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts HSLU, where he founded the StageLab stage training programme. Hans-Jürg Rickenbacher is President of the European Voice Teachers Association Switzerland EVTA.CH and a member of the Business Advisory Board of the FH Schweiz.