Known to many for his fine series of recordings of the piano music of Erik Satie for Philips, de Leeuw was a musician whose fascination for the music of the 20^th century enriched musical life for half a century.

Born to psychiatrist parents, de Leeuw studied at the conservatories in Amsterdam and The Hague, later teaching at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and at Leiden University.

In 1974 he founded the Schönberg Ensemble which specialised in music of the 20^th century, from the Second Viennese School onwards. A major figure in Dutch musical life, he conducted many of the country’s major ensembles and choirs, often writing music for them. He also appeared with numerous European orchestras – he was guest artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival in 1992 and from 1994 to 1998 was artistic director of the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. As a conductor he was involved in the creation or early performances of operatic works by Louis Andriessen, Ligeti, Claude Vivier and Robert Zuidam as well as major works by Britten and Stravinsky.

In 1981, Philips released a much-admired three-LP set of early piano music by Satie which put de Leeuw’s name in front of a larger audience, though his interest in the composer first bore fruit at the Holland Festivals of 1983 and 1984. Reviewing the set, Max Harrison wrote that ‘they are all marked Très lent, which is how Reinbert de Leeuw plays them. In fact he has the courage to play most of this music as slowly as the composer evidently wanted. Many “interpreters” feel that such pieces must be livened up, whereas the point is that they are almost as free of the ego as some medieval music. This is even true of the Sarabandes (1887), with their once-controversial harmony, and again de Leeuw holds to steady, very slow tempos.’ De Leeuw’s championing of rare Satie continued more recently with a recording with Barbara Hannigan of the song cycle Socrate and other songs for Winter & Winter. Peter Quantrill commented that ‘the introverted discretion of de Leeuw’s pianism is weighted to perfection during the six Mélodies’. The Hannigan partnership, which also embraced music by Andriessen, Jan van de Putte and Henry Brant, continued on record with an album, ‘Vienna. Fin de siècle’, for Alpha Classics.