Geoffrey Tozer - Honours and Awards

Honours and Awards

Geoffrey received several major awards twice in his lifetime. He 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. He was also 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".

He 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 Tozer while he was teaching at St Edmund's College, 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 A$9,000 a year, so he introduced the fellowships (they are sometimes referred to as "the Keatings") and the first five-year award in 1989 (A$329,000) went to Tozer. He was the subject of at least one political cartoon.

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 under Neeme Järvi won a Diapason d'Or prize in 1992. and was also nominated for a Grammy award. Although a few recordings of the concertos had been made before the advent of CDs, Tozer's recordings are regarded as an important early addition to the recorded repertoire of the Medtner concertos using modern recording techniques. His Medtner recordings were described by the French critic Alain Cochard as "a landmark in recorded history". He wrote "All that Medtner demands, Tozer possesses. This is the playing of a grand master; there is no doubt about it". In 2001, on the anniversary of Nikolai Medtner's death, he gave a recital of Medtner's works to a capacity audience in Melbourne; however, this concert received no reviews in any media.

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".

Among Tozer's unpublished recordings are some of considerable historical interest, such as his recording with the tenor Gerald English of Sir Michael Tippett's song cycle Boyhood's End.