Geoffrey Tozer

Geoffrey Peter Bede Hawkshaw Tozer (5 November 1954 – 21 August 2009) was an Australian classical pianist and composer. A child prodigy, he composed an opera at the age of eight and became the youngest recipient of a Churchill Fellowship award at 13. His career included tours of Europe, America, Australia and China, where he performed the Yellow River Concerto to an estimated audience of 80 million people. Tozer had more than 100 concertos in his repertoire, including those of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Medtner, Rachmaninoff, Bartók, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Gerhard.

Tozer recorded for Chandos Records, beginning with the works of Medtner. He 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.

Early life Conceived in Tasmania, Tozer was born in 1954 at Mussoorie, a hill station in the Indian Himalayas. His mother was Tassie Verna Fay Tozer (born Hawkshaw), a gifted musician and pianist who had become a music teacher to support herself and her two sons after her separation and subsequent divorce from Colonel (later Major-General) Donald Tozer.

In early 1954 she visited Tasmania to recover from a serious medical condition. to Melbourne, where Veronica taught him Beethoven, Bach and Bartók. He then attended De La Salle College, Malvern. in England and Theodore Lettvin in the United States. Eileen Ralf lived in Hobart, and the airline TAA flew Tozer there and back every week for lessons, free of charge. and soon afterwards made his European debut at a BBC Promenade Concert in the Royal Albert Hall, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Colin Davis. He was the youngest person to be awarded a Churchill Fellowship.

In 1971, aged 16, he stayed with Benjamin Britten for several weeks. Britten invited him to perform at the Aldeburgh Festival, where he accompanied the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

Tozer performed at the inaugural concert of the Melbourne Concert Hall in 1982. In the early 1980s he taught at the University of Michigan. From 1983 he based himself in Canberra and briefly taught at the ANU School of Music,

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

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 90th birthday, the ABC broadcast Tozer performing her music live from the Eugene Goossens Hall, Sydney. This included her Piano Sonata in G minor. He played one of her two piano concertos at the Australian Institute of Music in 2005, to an audience of only 15 people. Hyde said that the concerto needed someone of Tozer's power to play it. He had last played with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 1994 and with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 1995. The grants were inaugurated after Paul Keating met Tozer while he was teaching at St Edmund's College,

The fellowships allowed Tozer to travel to London to commence his recording career. He recorded most of the solo piano works of Nikolai Medtner. His recording for Chandos of the three Medtner piano concertos with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi won a Diapason d'Or prize in 1992 and was also nominated for a Grammy award.

Death While Tozer was undoubtedly affected by the death of his mother in 1996, and that of his long-time manager Reuben Fineberg in 1997, it is debatable whether, as some obituaries claimed, he "became unwell but carried on".

On 21 August 2009, he 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. the former prime minister, Paul Keating, said that Tozer deserved to be remembered alongside the Australian triumvirate of Nellie Melba, Percy Grainger and Joan Sutherland, he was treated with indifference, contempt and malevolence by the Melbourne and Sydney symphony orchestras. The people who chose repertoire for those two orchestras and who had charge of the selection of artists during this period should hang their heads in shame at their neglect of him. ... If anyone needs a case example of the bitchiness and preference within the arts in Australia, here you have it.

Keating described the death of Tozer as "like Canada having lost Glenn Gould, or France, Ginette Neveu. It is a massive cultural loss, the kind of loss people felt when Germany lost Dresden." He compared Tozer to the pianists Emil Gilels, Arthur Rubinstein, Sviatoslav Richter, Ferruccio Busoni, Artur Schnabel, and the soprano Maria Callas, who died alone in Paris in 1977. Keating said, "In the end, his liver failed. But I think I have to say we all let him down. ... We should have cared more and done more." featuring Richard Gill, was triggered by Keating's speech.

Legacy Tozer's legacy is preserved at the official Geoffrey Tozer Legacy website, which is administered by his estate and includes "more than 12,000 documents, 750 recordings of his performances, and a number of interviews from around the world, 3000 photographs, four portraits, film and video, prizes and awards from around the world, personal effects including performance apparel, 29 archival boxes of Tozer's annotated performance scores, 1500 books on music from his personal library, and his own drawings, caricatures and paintings, and more than 200 original Tozer compositions".