Thomas Riebl was born in Vienna in 1956. He studied viola with Siegfried Führlinger, Peter Schidlof and Sandor Végh. At age 16 he made his debut at the Vienna Konzerthaus. Ever since, he has graced some of the most famous concert stages in Europe and the US such as the Vienna Musikverein, Concertgebouw Amsterdam or Carnegie Hall. He has performed with orchestras like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Vienna and Berlin Symphonic, the Symphony Orchestra of the Bavarian Broadcasting Company or the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Claudio Abbado, Horst Stein, Edo de Waart, Andrew Davies and Sylvain Cambreling.

Thomas Riebl has been guest musician at many renowned international music festivals performing amongst others with Jessye Norman, Gidon Kremer, Benjamin Schmid, Isabelle Faust, Joshua Bell, Tabea Zimmermann, Natalia Gutman, Boris Pergamenschikow, Sabine Meyer, Andras Schiff, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the Juilliard String Quartet. He also proved very successful at the international music competitions in Budapest and Munich (ARD Competition) and won First Prize as well as the Ernst-Walfisch-Gedächtnispreis at the International Naumburg Viola Competition in New York in 1982. From 1972 to 1979 Thomas was violist with the Vienna Franz Schubert Quartet (First Prize at the European Broadcasting Companies Competition in Stockholm in 1974). Subsequently, he became a member of the Vienna String Sextet until 2004 extensively embarking on concert tours and regularly guesting at acclaimed music festivals such as the Salzburg Festival, Vienna and Berlin Festwochen or the Edinburgh Festival and recording a great number of videos and CDs (EMI). As a soloist, he recorded CDs for RCA, pan classics and Hyperion Records.

Thomas Riebl holds a professorship at the Mozarteum University Salzburg since 1983. He has given numerous master classes at highly reputed international music academies. Many students of his emerged as prize winners in international competitions, music university professors or became members of leading orchestra and string quartets.