Reinhold Friedrich

Since winning second prize at the ARD Music Competition in Munich in 1986, Reinhold Friedrich has performed on the world’s most prestigious stages. His repertoire spans from the most contemporary pieces for solo trumpet to the earliest music composed for the instrument’s origins, such as the Baroque trumpet or the keyed trumpet. He made his debut at the Berliner Festwochen performing Luciano Berio’s Sequenza X, and in 1994 at the Musikverein in Vienna, he performed Joseph Haydn’s keyed trumpet concerto. He has been principal trumpet of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra since its founding and is the artistic director of the festival’s Brass Ensemble.
He has performed with the ensemble Capriccio Basel, the Orchester des Champs-Élysées, and the Vienna Academy with period instruments. He has also premiered works by composers Wolfgang Rihm, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Rebecca Saunders, Hans Werner Henze, Nicolaus A. Huber, and Adriana Hölszky. The breadth of his repertoire is demonstrated by the concertos Eirene by Herbert Willi and Nobody knows de trouble I see by Bernd Alois Zimmermann (an ECHO Classic award-winning album).
As a soloist, he has performed with ensembles such as the Berliner Barock Solisten, La Stagione Frankfurt, the Vienna and Basler Chamber Orchestras, the Bamberger and Vienna Symphony Orchestras, the Radio France Philharmonic, the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the BBC Orchestra, and all ARD orchestras. He has also performed under the baton of Claudio Abbado, Semyon Bychkov, Dennis Russell Davies, Peter Eötvös, Reinhard Goebel, Martin Haselböck, Philippe Herreweghe, Christopher Hogwood, Eliahu Inbal, Krystjan and Neeme Järvi, Dmitri Kitajenko, Sir Neville Marriner, Ingo Metzmacher, Jonathan Nott, Kazushi Ono, and Hans Zender, among others. His recent collaborations with chamber musicians include artists such as Eriko Takezwa (piano), Robyn Schulkowsky (percussion), and Martin Lücker and Sebastian Küchler-Blessing (organ). Since its founding in 2013, he has performed with the group L’éventail de Jeanne alongside Claudio Bohórquez (cello), Sascha Armbruster (saxophone), and Eriko Takezawa (piano).
He has given concerts in Japan, Mexico, Israel, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, and Switzerland with ensembles such as the Lucerne Festival String Group, the Berliner Barock Solisten, the Jenaer Philharmonie, and the Neue Philharmonie Westfalen.
His recent engagements include Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 with the Philharmonie Baden-Baden, where he was also artist-in-residence, conducted by Sir András Schiff. In May 2017, he premiered the concerto written for him by Benjamin Yusupov. At the request of the Royal Academy of London and the Juilliard School of New York, he served as an artistic expert in the recording of an album and the organization of concerts centered around the work of Giovanni Gabrieli.
He will also perform, together with Dorothee Mields, with the Mendelssohn Chamber Orchestra of Leipzig, as well as with the Erfurt Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vallès Orchestra, the Israel Camerata, and the Taiwan Symphony Orchestra. With the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, he will premiere the trumpet concerto Aerial by composer HK Gruber.
His many albums illustrate the exhaustiveness of his work, including, with ECHO Classic, the Russian trumpet concertos, with the Göttingen Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Christoph Mathias Mueller, an album with the Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam conducted by George Benjamin, the first recording, with Coviello Classics, of the trumpet concerto “Pieta” by Christian Jost, and, with Sony, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 with the Barock Solisten of Berlin under the baton of Reinhard Goebel.
Reinhold Friedrich is a professor in Karlsruhe, in Hiroshima (Japan), and an honorary professor at the Royal Academy of London. He gives master classes all over the world, and his former students include both professors (at the universities of Hanover, Paris, Essen, Detmold, and Budapest) and artists in the best orchestras in the world (Berlin, Munich, Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Leipzig, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Moscow, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro). He is currently a professor of the IF International Foundation Trumpet Chair at the Reina Sofía School of Music.