Geoffrey Govier is one of the leading British exponents of the early piano. Having studied modern piano at the Royal College of Music in London from which he graduated with first-class honours, he studied fortepiano first privately with Melvyn Tan in London, with Stanley Hoogland in Amsterdam and then gained his doctorate from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York studying with Malcolm Bilson.

He has played in many parts of the world, including Europe, New Zealand, the far and Middle East, and America both as a soloist and a chamber musician. He has collaborated with many key figures in the period-instrument movement, including the singers Charles Daniels, Catherine Bott, Gerald Finley, the horn player Andrew Clark, and the chamber groups The Revolutionary Drawing Room and Ensemble Galant with whom he has made a number of recordings (BBC, Olympia, EMI and Hyperion). He has a duo with the Polish fortepianist, Katarzyna Drogosz.

He worked particularly with Catherine Mackintosh from the 1980s to the 2015, specialising in the violin sonatas of Mozart and they recorded a cycle of the major works for Chandos. These recordings received critical acclaim and were Gramophone magazine’s critics’ choice and CD of the month when released.

Passionate about teaching, he gives regular masterclasses in Britain and abroad. His introduction to Hummel’s Ausführlich theoretisch-praktische Anweisung zum Piano-Forte-Spiel [1828] was published in 1998 (Tokyo: Sinfonia) and he contributed the fortepiano article to The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Historical Performance in Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).