Geoffrey Tozer

Geoffrey Tozer

Geoffrey Tozer (5 November 1954–21 August 2009) was an Australian classical pianist.

Early life

Geoffrey Peter Bede Hawkshaw Tozer was born to Veronica Tozer and Anglican minister Geoffrey Conan-Davies in the Indian Himalayas and lived his first four years in the hill station of Mussoorie before moving with his mother and older brother Peter to Melbourne, Australia, where he attended De La Salle College, Malvern. In 1962, at the age of eight, Tozer performed J. S. Bach's Concerto No. 5 in F Minor with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in a concert that was televised nationally by the ABC. In February 1963 he performed a Haydn concerto before a live audience at the Myer Music Bowl, a performance which can be heard on the disc issued to coincide with his Celebration Forty tour in 2004. In 1964, in Melbourne's Nicholas Hall, he performed a Beethoven concerto with the Astra Orchestra under George Logie-Smith. Within four years he had played all five Beethoven concertos.

Studies

He studied with Eileen Ralf and Keith Humble in Australia, Maria Curcio in England, and Theodore Lettvin in the USA. He became the youngest semi-finalist ever (aged fourteen) at the Leeds International Piano Competition and soon afterwards made his European debut at a BBC Promenade Concert in the Royal Albert Hall, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis. He was the youngest person to be awarded a Churchill Fellowship.

He performed at the inaugural concert of the Melbourne Concert Hall in 1982. In the early 1980s he taught at the University of Michigan and in the mid 1980s he taught at the Canberra School of Music.

Later career

In 1993, Tozer made his first tour of China, appearing in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and other cities. In 1994, he made the first complete recording of the four piano concertos of Ottorino Respighi, with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Edward Downes.

In May 2003, Tozer gave a recital in New York City with Colin McPhillamy, in which they gave the first performance in the United States of Nikolai Medtner's The Treehouse. This followed an appearance in Birmingham to play in a tribute to Medtner's foremost pupil, the late Edna Iles.

In May 2001, Tozer was the first Western artist to perform the Yellow River Concerto in China. His performance, which received a standing ovation, was broadcast live on Chinese national television and was watched by an estimateed audience of 80 million people.

Tozer championed the music of many under-recorded composers, such as Respighi, Alan Rawsthorne, John Blackwood McEwen, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Roberto Gerhard, Percy Grainger, John Ireland (the Piano Concerto in E flat) and Nikolai Tcherepnin. At one Berlin Festival, Tozer gave an all-Artur Schnabel concert, in the presence of the entire Schnabel family; he has also recorded Schnabel's music.

Tozer also championed another Melbourne prodigy, pianist Noel Mewton-Wood, who died in 1953. Tozer has said of him: "He was the most stimulating and intellectually powerful pianist Australia has ever produced. He had been completely forgotten before his work reappeared on CD and everyone realised how revolutionary his playing was." Tozer first heard of him when he prepared to play Bach and Beethoven as a seven-year-old for Mewton-Wood's former Melbourne teacher, Waldemar Seidel. "I played a few bars and he jumped up shouting, 'Noel's come back'. I had never heard of him, of course. But, after listening to his records, I realised it was the greatest musical compliment I've ever received."

Geoffrey Tozer was a noted improviser. He sometimes ended formal recitals by improvisations using themes and styles suggested by the audience: Donizetti, Bellini, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, Bartók, Piazzolla, Cage, Satie, Gershwin and Brahms simultaneously, and many others.

In January 2003, to celebrate Miriam Hyde's ninetieth birthday, the ABC broadcast Geoffrey Tozer performing her music live, from the Eugene Goossens Hall, Sydney.

Honours and awards

Geoffrey received several major awards twice in his lifetime. He won his first his first Churchill Fellowship at 14 and won a second at 17; he was also twice awarded Israel's Rubenstein Medal, in 1977 and 1980 and was awarded two consecutive Australian Artists Creative Fellowship grants, worth more than $500,000 in total, in the 1990s.

The "Keatings" (as the fellowships were known) paid $11.7 million to 65 artists between 1989 and 1996. The fellowship allowed Tozer to travel to London to commence his recording career. While there, Tozer recorded most of the solo piano works of Nikolai Medtner. His recording of the three Medtner concertos won a Diapason d'Or prize in 1992. and was also nominated for a Grammy award.

There was criticism of his second Creative Fellowship grant, and the then federal Liberal-National Coalition Opposition led the protests, claiming that with so many worthy figures in the arts community, it was outrageous that Tozer -- a close friend of the then Treasurer and later Prime Minister Paul Keating -- should have been selected a second time. According to his obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald, the grants were inaugurated after Keating met Tozer while he was teaching at the Canberra school where Keating's son Patrick was a student. Keating, who cites Tozer as Australia's greatest pianist, said he felt "ashamed" that a pianist of Tozer's talents was earning only $9000 a year, so he introduced what became known as "the Keatings" and the first five-year award in 1989 ($329,000) went to Tozer.

His other international awards included Hungary's Liszt Centenary Medallion, Belgium's Prix Alex De Varies and Britain's Royal Overseas League Medallion, although he received no similar honours in Australia.

In 1996 his recording of piano works by Ferruccio Busoni won the Soundscapes (Australia) prize for "Record of the Year".

Death

On 21 August 2009 Geoffrey Tozer died from liver disease at the East Malvern house in Melbourne in which he lived as a child, having been released from the Alfred Hospital the previous week. He was survived by four of five siblings.

External links

• "Tozer back on the road" article from The Age
• Tozer playing the Étude in A flat, Op. 1, No. 2, by Paul de Schlözer at YouTube