Obituaries Australia

'Joy, pathos and inspiration: an unfinished symphony'

Georgina Grosvenor lived for music, and her viola.

A musician of exceptional ability and rare dedication, at the age of 12 she left her home in Melbourne to study in England. She spent the rest of her life abroad, learning and teaching, performing in chamber music ensembles and orchestras and as a soloist.

She won awards and prizes from organisations as august as Yale in America, the Royal Academy of Music in England and the Sommerakademie in Austria, but her achievement is equally measured by the effect on those she met of her magnetic personality and the way she lived her life.

‘She was a person of such quality,’ say two teachers and associates, one English, the other American. ‘We all felt the invisible touch of her passion for life and her ageless beauty,’ says her husband.

Even after being diagnosed with cancer, she encouraged herself and other musicians through the example of her disciplined and determined practising, creative generosity and striking absence of self-pity. Last February, before illness forced a retreat to her parents’ home at Mt Macedon (where she died), she took a successful master class at the Victorian College of the Arts when she was barely well enough to stand.

Generous to a fault, she extended her music into the community, establishing immediate and heart-warming bonds as she taught at workshops in schools and children’s hospitals in London’s East End and in Chicago, and worked for developmentally disabled people in New Jersey.

Away from music she was a valued voice in the Internet chat room of the US-based Breast Cancer Support Board, where her calm good sense and lively sense of humour helped women to confront and deal with their anxieties and practical problems. From her own sickbed she arranged for a woman in Texas to receive regular medical and pastoral care. The chat room lit up at the news of her death. Candles burned for her around the world.

Georgina Grosvenor grew up a gentle, serene child who approached violin lessons with intensity and delight, devouring the music put in front of her, skipping through the grades at breakneck pace. She attended Glamorgan School then took a music scholarship to Lauriston, but soon auditioned for two of England’s most prestigious music schools, winning a place at each.

She began at Chethams School of Music in Manchester when her parents left Melbourne to live in Hong Kong. She is remembered setting out from Hong Kong Airport after school holidays, violin case in hand, her huge blue eyes sparkling at the adventures ahead.

The viola became her principal study. She loved its deeper sound and very early on had persuaded her teacher to let her try it.

Tuition at Chethams was exacting, with academic and musical studies six days a week. Aged 16, Georgina began using her day off to travel by train from Manchester to Wimbledon for lessons with David Takeno, the founding violinist of the Tokyo String Quartet, who was professor of strings at Guildhall. After performing in Lincoln Centre New York the following year, she committed to life as a professional musician.

For the next 10 years she studied at the Guildhall and at Yale. Passionate about chamber music, she was founding violist of two string quartets – the Cosmos and the Enso. She held the prestigious Leverhulme Chamber Music Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Music, and the Cosmos was the first string quartet given a residency at the Yale School of Music.

Her Master’s degree at Yale was interrupted only briefly when her illness surfaced at the end of 1998. Radiotherapy could always be fitted into the day, even if the rest of that day involved a concert performance or her own graduation, when she was chosen as Charles Finch Dalton Memorial Scholar. She adored Yale, particularly ‘her’ corner at Naples, a smoky all-night students’ coffee and pizza haunt. In 2000 she received Yale’s important Artist Diploma. The same year she married fellow student Dr Peter Mitev, a physicist from Bulgaria.

More illness and treatment early in 2001 did not halt her schedule at the University of Northern Illinois, where her string quartet had taken up a coveted residency with the Vermeer Quartet. The stipend for such positions requires supplementing; Georgina taught in the school of music there and was assistant principal in the Rockford Symphony Orchestra, with performances an hour’s drive away along dark, snowy roads.

Rejection by her quartet on health grounds was a most severe blow from which she rebounded with determination. She concentrated on solo playing and continued to explore new music, particularly with the Yale-based Australian composer Padma Newsome. His Concerto for Viola, Winds and String Orchestra, written with a grant from the Australian Council for the Arts, is dedicated to her. She appeared at festivals, last year performing Joachim’s Hebrew Melodies at the Heifetz International to great acclaim. With this she recited Byron‘s related verses including ‘She walks in beauty’.

Strong yet fragile, dignified yet joyous and bubbling over with curiosity, she had almost impossibly high standards and drove herself onward with energy. She didn’t often relax, and she never shied away from an opportunity. Music to her was not only deeply moving and intellectually challenging but mystical, a link with other times, people and places. There was a touch of other-worldliness about her that contrasted with her mercurial mind and her focussed approach.

Because the centre of her world was elsewhere, she performed only rarely in Australia. And she has left few recordings, because she believed that recording jinxed performance.

But her legacy will live on. She directed in her will that her estate should fund a prize for a violist at the Yale School of Music. And her name will be perpetuated at the Breast Cancer Support Board where, as one woman wrote after her death: ‘She reached out to me and taught me patience and peace….In the dimness of fear and uncertainty that comes with this disease, Georgie has shed a tremendous light’.

She is survived by her husband, her parents Francis and Sue Ebury (the Earl and Countess of Wilton), and her half-brother, Julian Grosvenor.