Michael Gielen was an Austrian conductor and composer, one of the most important interpreters of modern and contemporary music in the later twentieth century.

In the Pristine catalogue he appears with Alfred Brendel in early concerto recordings of Mozart, Prokofiev and Schoenberg.

Gielen’s conducting was clear, analytical and unsentimental, with a modernist ear for structure and tension. He was especially at home where music needed intellectual steel rather than plush upholstery.

His page is justified by stature and repertory context. Gielen gives the Brendel shelf a sharp Viennese modernist outline.