Geoffrey Tozer Biography - Geoffrey Tozer Legacy

Geoffrey Tozer (1954-2009)

Biography

‘I was born in the Indian Himalayas in a small town high above the winter snowline called Mussoorie. The first music I heard in my cot was my mother playing and teaching the piano, and Beethoven works played on the windup gramophone by Artur Schnabel.’

‘An interesting feature of the concert was the debut of nine year old Geoffrey Tozer as soloist. It was a performance of great charm that would have done credit to a seasoned campaigner, displaying fine musical talent and a natural instinct for a Bachian phrase, particularly beautifully realized in the ‘arioso’.’

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 recognized early in his childhood and during a
professional career that lasted for nearly fifty years he developed
into a mature artist, fully realizing his abilities and earning renown
around the world with recitals and concerts on five continents.