Tommy Tycho

Thomas (Tommy) Tycho AM MBE (11 April 1928 – 4 April 2013) was a multi-talented Hungarian-born Australian pianist, conductor, composer and arranger. He was associated with musical productions on Australian television for many years from its inception in 1956, including such programs as The Mavis Bramston Show. The recorded version of the National Anthem Advance Australia Fair that is now usually used to accompany singers at major sporting and community events is Tommy Tycho's arrangement. He wrote a number of film scores, and his activities bridged both popular and classical styles.

Tommy Tycho was born in Budapest in 1928. His father was a senior government official and his mother was an opera singer who had retired to raise a family. His musical life started as a child prodigy pianist. He played George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra at age 10. He had been introduced to the work by his teacher, Egon Petri. He commenced studying at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where his teachers included Leo Weiner and Zoltán Kodály. He and his parents had adopted Lutheranism in an attempt to disguise their Jewishness, but to no avail - he was interned in a German forced labour camp in 1943 at age 15, and was lucky to survive. He resumed his studies after the war, but fled his country ahead of the Communist takeover while still only in his third year of study. From 1948 to 1951 he lived in Iran, where he was the personal pianist for the Shah of Iran. There he met a woman named Eve, another Hungarian, who became his wife. They emigrated to Australia in 1951.

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