Hungerford, Bruce

Pianist.

Born in 1922 in Korumburra, Victoria, Australia, Bruce Hungerford studied in Sydney with Ignaz Friedman and in the U.S. with Ernest Hutcheson and Olga Samaroff. He was a student and friend of Myra Hess, who introduced him to Carl Friedberg. In 1950, Hungerford won the first annual Carl Friedberg Alumni Association Scholarship, through which he had twenty-five lessons with Friedberg. Hungerford began his performing career in 1958 in Europe; in 1967 he moved to the U.S. where he performed, recorded, and taught at the Mannes College of Music in New York. During this period, he was engaged to record the complete piano works of Beethoven for Vanguard. Having studied paleontology at Columbia University and the Museum of Natural History in New York in the 1950's, Hungerford pursued research in dinosaur fossils and in Egyptology simultaneously with his music career. He travelled to Egypt in 1961 as a photographer on the NBC River Nile Expedition and made five later trips to Egypt under auspices of the American Research Center in Egypt and the American University in Cairo. He lectured frequently in Egypt, sometimes combining lecture and concert tours. Hungerford died in an automobile accident in 1977.

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