Ádám Friedrich passed away

Ádám Friedrich started his music studies at the Conservatory of Miskolc in 1951. In 1956, he was admitted to the Ferenc Liszt College of Music where his teachers were Ferenc Romagnoli and Zoltán Lubik.

From 1958, Friedrich was a member of the MÁV Symphony Orchestra and from 1960, a member of the Hungarian State Concert Orchestra; he was first horn of the latter ensemble from 1966 and later on became the first horn of the Ferenc Liszt Chamber Orchestra and the Hungarian Chamber Orchestra. He was a founding member of the Budapest Festival Orchestra.

As a chamber musician, he was a member of the Alpe-Adria Chamber Ensemble from Trieste and the Filharmónia Wind Quintet. As a soloist, he performed in a number of countries worldwide, including France, Poland, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States, and Australia. From 1994, he served as Vice President of the International Horn Society. He was an organiser and the host of the First Hungarian International Horn Festival of 1955. He taught master courses in Hungary and abroad, including Austria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Poland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Slovenia.

He began teaching in 1971 in the District VI. State School of Music in Budapest, then from 1973 at the Béla Bartók Conservatory. From 1983, he was an assistant professor and an associate professor at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music from 1983 and from 1997, a professor at the university. Between 1994-2002, he was an associate professor at the Béla Bartók Institute of Music at the University of Miskolc and from 2002 to 2004, he was a college professor at the same institution.

In recognition of his work, he was awarded the Liszt Prize in 1984, he was bestowed with the Artist of Merit title in 1987 and in 2010 he won the Bartók-Pásztory Prize.

He was one of the presenters on the Musical Afternoon programme of Bartók Radio. He published four books between 2003 and 2017; in his volume entitled Copper Engravings, he said the following about his teaching and his recordings: ”It was good to start teaching at a relatively young age, because—to a certain degree—I could be an example to my students. If  they didn't believe something, they could come to the concerts and witness that I didn’t hold with the hare and run with the hounds. It was the same during the 10 years spent at the Conservatory and even at the Academy of Music for many years… There are people who deny their older recordings, saying those no longer reflect who they are, that they would play differently and better today. I do not have a great many recordings or records, but I stand by every sound that has—one way or another—sprung, erupted, flown or tumbled from my horn. I used to be all these sounds at one point in time …”