John Ogdon, 52; Concert Pianist and Composer

John Ogdon, a concert pianist and composer known for his work on behalf of modern music who had been making a comeback after suffering a mental breakdown, died Tuesday at age 52, his agents said.

Manygate Management said Ogdon died peacefully after going into a coma after his admission to London’s Charing Cross Hospital on Monday for bronchopneumonia.

Before the time in the late 1960s that the schizophrenia that ran in his family sharply limited his career, Ogdon had developed a vast repertoire of classic and modern music and composed chamber music, a symphony and a piano concerto.

A golden future seemed assured when, at 25, Ogdon shared top place with Soviet pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy in the piano section of the 1962 Moscow Tchaikovsky International Competition for young musicians.

Acclaimed by Audience

After Ogdon played the Liszt No. 1 Piano Concerto and the Tchaikovsky No. 1 Piano Concerto, the audience rose and demanded that he be awarded first prize.

Ogdon and Ashkenazy became friends. In 1966, Ashkenazy performed a new work by Ogdon at the Cheltenham Festival in England. Ogdon toured the Soviet Union several times and traveled throughout Europe, the United States, Canada and the Far East.

After his breakdown, Ogdon’s hair turned white, he became obese and he spent time in a mental hospital. This year the British Broadcasting Corp. presented a television program called “Virtuoso,” describing his crippling bouts of mental illness. It was based on a book his wife had written about her husband’s despair.

But Ogdon began a comeback in 1981, and in the last 12 months he recorded the complete piano works of Sergei Rachmaninoff, several albums of popular piano pieces and Kaikhosru Sorabji’s “Opus Clavcicembalisticum.”