Geoffrey Tozer in Concert: Auckland 1990

Geoffrey Tozer was an artist of the first rank, a consummate musician, a concert pianist and recitalist with few peers, possessing perfect pitch, a boundless musical memory, the ability to improvise, to transpose instantly into any key or to create on the piano a richly textured reduction of an orchestral score at sight. He was a superb accompanist and a generous collaborator in chamber music. He was also a composer.

Tozer composed from childhood and left more than 160 compositions several of which he performed publicly in Australia and overseas. His prodigious abilities were recognised early in his childhood and during a professional career that lasted for nearly fifty years he developed into a mature artist, fully realising his abilities and earning renown around the world with recitals and concerts on five continents. He made his first recording in 1963 and, as an exclusive artist of Chandos during his adult career, produced thirty-four recordings of distinction, six commercial recordings for several Australian record companies and hundreds of other recordings mainly for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, including complete concertos of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Medtner on film. Tozer won numerous awards during his career including the Winston Churchill Fellowship (twice, Australia), the Australian Creative Artists Fellowship (twice, Australia), the Rubinstein Medal (twice, Israel), the Alex de Vries Prize (Belgium), the Royal Overseas League (United Kingdom), the Diapason d’Or (France), the Liszt Centenary Medallion (Hungary) and a Grammy Nomination for Best Classical Performance (USA), becoming the only Australian pianist to achieve such distinction.

Geoffrey Tozer died on 21 August 2009 at the age of just fifty-four. After Tozer’s untimely death, journalist James Campbell described him in the media as ‘Australia’s greatest and most recorded pianist’. Tozer’s greatness is certainly evident in his recorded output and witnessed by his vast performance history which exceeds that of any other Australian pianist. The body of more than 600 recordings which Tozer produced between 1963 and 2009 fully justified Campbell’s description.

Throughout his career Tozer resisted the frequent calls that he permanently re-locate to the northern hemisphere and sign with a major international agent. Whatever this cost him in career terms, he proved it was possible to achieve international renown as a pianist while based permanently in Australia. His overwhelming motivation was always to bring music to the people whether this meant playing for a local audience or piano students in regional China, giving a Master Class in Mexico City or performing for three weeks on a tour of country towns in South Australia.