Obituary, Reinbert de Leeuw (1938-2020)

The Dutch conductor, pianist and composer Reinbert de Leeuw, who was a leading interpreter of the music of Erik Satie as well as a passionate champion of contemporary music, has died aged 81.

The son of two eminent psychiatrists, de Leeuw was born in Amsterdam in 1938 and studied piano at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. He founded the Schönberg Ensemble in 1974, initially to explore music by the Second Viennese School, though the group subsequently broadened its focus to encompass other twentieth-century and contemporary repertoire and worked closely with composers including Oliver Knussen, Galina Ustvolskaya, Louis Andriessen, Hans Abrahamsen, Claude Vivier and György Ligeti. They also collaborated regularly with the Asko Ensemble (formed in Amsterdam in 1965) on larger-scale works, and when the two ensembles officially merged to form Asko | Schönberg in 2008 de Leeuw became their conductor; their discography includes a Grammy-nominated collection of Kurtág’s Complete Works for Ensemble and Choir and an extensive survey of the music of Ligeti on Teldec. De Leeuw also had a close relationship with Collegium Vocale Gent, with whom he recorded Liszt’s Via Crucis shortly before his eightieth birthday – the album was praised in Gramophone for De Leeuw’s ‘almost transcendental poise’. Further afield, he guested with orchestras including the Berliner Philharmoniker and Los Angeles Philharmonic, and served as Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh and Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festivals.

De Leeuw maintained a busy and varied career as a solo pianist alongside his conducting work, and received widespread acclaim for his recordings of Satie’s piano music on Philips in the 1980s and 90s. His compositional output was modest but significant, and includes the large-scale orchestral works Interplay (1965), Abschied (1971-3) and Der nächtlige Wanderer (2013), and Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, an Expressionist response to Schumann’s Dichterliebe composed for the German actress Barbara Sukowa in 2003.

De Leeuw remained active on the concert-platform and in the recording studio until very close to the end of his life, particularly with Collegium Vocale Gent and the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, with whom he enjoyed a close friendship for two decades; they marked his eightieth birthday with a performance of Satie’s Socrate in Amsterdam, and their album Vienna – Fin de Siècle (featuring songs by Zemlinsky, Alma Mahler, Berg, Schoenberg and Webern) won a Juno Award in 2019.

Reinbert de Leeuw - a selected discography