32 Facts About Geoffrey Tozer

Geoffrey Peter Bede Hawkshaw Tozer was an Australian classical pianist and composer.

Geoffrey Tozer's career included tours of Europe, America, Australia and China, where he performed the Yellow River Concerto to an estimated audience of 80 million people.

Geoffrey Tozer recorded for the Chandos label, beginning with the works of Medtner.

Geoffrey Tozer was regarded as a "superb recitalist" and had the ability to improvise, transpose "instantly" and reduce an orchestral score to a piano score at sight.

Geoffrey Tozer won numerous awards and much recognition worldwide, but suffered comparative neglect in Australia, during the last years of his life.

Geoffrey Tozer lived his first four years in India, thanks to the generosity of Princess Usha.

Geoffrey Tozer moved with his mother and older brother Peter to Melbourne, where Veronica taught him Beethoven, Bach and Bartok.

Geoffrey Tozer attended St Joseph's Parish School, Malvern, and then De La Salle College, Malvern.

In 1962, at the age of eight, Geoffrey Tozer performed Bach's Concerto No 5 in F minor with the Victorian Symphony Orchestra under Clive Douglas, in a concert that was televised nationally on ABC TV.

Geoffrey Tozer studied with Eileen Ralf and Keith Humble in Australia, Maria Curcio in England and Theodore Lettvin in the United States.

Geoffrey Tozer later described Ralf's teaching as "the greatest musical gift given me".

Geoffrey Tozer was the youngest person to be awarded a Churchill Fellowship.

Geoffrey Tozer performed at the inaugural concert of the Melbourne Concert Hall in 1982.

In 1993, Geoffrey Tozer made his first tour of China, appearing in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and other cities.

In May 2001, Geoffrey Tozer was the first Western artist to perform the Yellow River Concerto in China, at the invitation of the Chinese Ministry of Culture.

In May 2003, Geoffrey 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.

Geoffrey 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 and Nikolai Tcherepnin.

At one Berlin Festival, Geoffrey Tozer gave an all-Artur Schnabel concert in the presence of the entire Schnabel family; he recorded Schnabel's music.

Geoffrey Tozer championed another Melbourne prodigy, pianist Noel Mewton-Wood, who died in 1953.

Geoffrey Tozer had been completely forgotten before his work reappeared on CD and everyone realised how revolutionary his playing was.

Geoffrey Tozer created the piano reduction of the vocal score for Minoru Miki's opera An Actor's Revenge.

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

In January 2003, to celebrate Miriam Hyde's 90th birthday, the ABC broadcast Geoffrey Tozer performing her music live from the Eugene Goossens Hall, Sydney.

Geoffrey Tozer played one of her two piano concertos at the Australian Institute of Music in 2005, to an audience of only 15 people.

Geoffrey Tozer had last played with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 1994 and with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 1995.

Geoffrey Tozer won his first Churchill Fellowship at 14 and won a second at 17; this was possible only because the Churchill committee decided to lower the minimum age by five years in recognition of Tozer's talents.

Geoffrey Tozer was twice awarded Israel's Rubinstein Medal, in 1977 and 1980; on the first occasion, he was handed the prize personally by Arthur Rubinstein who described him as "an extraordinary pianist".

Geoffrey Tozer was awarded two consecutive Australian Artists Creative Fellowships, worth more than A$500,000 in total, in the 1990s.

The grants were inaugurated after Paul Keating met Geoffrey Tozer while he was teaching at St Edmund's College, the Canberra school where Keating's son Patrick was a student.

Geoffrey Tozer was the subject of at least one political cartoon.

Geoffrey Tozer recorded most of the solo piano works of Nikolai Medtner.

Geoffrey Tozer's recording for Chandos of the three Medtner piano concertos with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Neeme Jarvi won a Diapason d'Or prize in 1992 and was nominated for a Grammy award.