Reinbert de Leeuw

Throughout the final decades of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first, Reinbert de Leeuw built a distinguished profile as a particularly articulate and compelling interpreter of modern repertoire on the podium. Although he first attracted widespread notice in the 1970s for his thoughtful accounts of Erik Satie’s piano music, he soon concentrated his efforts on directing pieces by living composers, especially those independent spirits who resisted the serialist mainstream that held sway in new-music circles for nearly fifty years after the Second World War.

Born in Amsterdam on September 8, 1939, de Leeuw trained in piano and theory at the Amsterdam Conservatory and studied composition at The Hague Conservatory. While still a student he developed a strong interest in experimental and forward-looking works; he helped establish the Dutch Charles Ives Society and, in 1969, co-authored a biography of Ives with the poet J. Bernlef. In 1974 he created the Schoenberg Ensemble in The Hague, an ensemble devoted not only to the Second Viennese School but also to a wide span of music stretching from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first. Because the group collaborated so frequently with the ASKO Ensemble, the two organizations eventually merged, and de Leeuw became their joint principal conductor. He also appeared as a guest with the Aldeburgh Festival, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the New World Symphony, the RIAS-Kammerchor, the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra, and the Netherlands Opera. Between 1994 and 1998 he served as artistic director of the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music and later acted as artistic advisor for contemporary programming at the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

In his later years de Leeuw devoted himself almost entirely to repertoire extending from the early modern era to the present day. He developed especially close associations with the music of Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti, and Louis Andriessen—three composers whose intricate, highly sophisticated languages posed formidable technical challenges yet conveyed a striking directness of expression rare in an age when most new music struck listeners as forbidding. De Leeuw’s intimate grasp of their individual idioms and his authoritative performances rendered these works especially gripping. At the keyboard he recorded music by Satie, Bartók, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Ustvolskaya, Messiaen, and Górecki, along with a number of strongly individualistic figures from outside Europe such as Ruth Crawford Seeger, George Antheil, Henry Brant, Steve Reich, Percy Grainger, and Claude Vivier.

De Leeuw composed most actively during the 1960s and 1970s, producing orchestral and chamber works as well as the opera Reconstructie, a collaborative score based on the life of Che Guevara that he created with Andriessen, Misha Mengelberg, Peter Schat, and Jan van Vlijmen. In 2003 he completed Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, an audaciously free recomposition of twenty-one lieder by Schubert and Schumann for voice and orchestra; a decade later he wrote the symphonic poem Der nächtliche Wanderer. Reinbert de Leeuw died in Amsterdam on February 14, 2020.