The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

8th October 2024

It’s a particular pleasure to be able to congratulate the Czech Philharmonic on their Gramophone award of ‘Orchestra of the Year’ in this Year of Czech Music – a year, moreover, which marks the bicentenary of Bedřich Smetana’s birth. Like Smetana, the Czech Philharmonic is central to the musical life of the Czech nation, although its origins are more recent. It can trace its origins back to 4 January 1896, when musicians from Prague’s National Theatre – a focal point in the Czech nation-building project – gave a concert... read more

1st October 2024

What do you think of at the mention of ‘French opera’? Bizet’s Carmen, perhaps? Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande? The operas of Berlioz and Massenet? The grand oparas of Meyerbeer, the opéras comiques of Auber or the operettas of Offenbach? Yet the French operatic tradition is almost as old and certainly as impressive as that of Italy. And there are many who would argue that its ‘golden age’ came as early as the 18th century, with the generation of composers who followed the pioneering works of Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687),... read more

17th September 2024

Holst regarded it as his masterpiece, and so did his friend Vaughan Williams. Yet ever since its premiere in February 1928 Egdon Heath has stood in the shadow of two works Holst composed more than a decade previously, the St Paul’s Suite (1912–13) and The Planets (1914–16). Though it lacks the immediate tuneful appeal of those two works, this short tone-poem (under 15 minutes in duration) has in common with some of the more mystical passages of The Planets an atmosphere of detachment, coupled with passages reminiscent of the... read more

11th September 2024

This week marks the sesquicentenary of the birth of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), one of the most radically consequential composers of the 20th century and a key figure in the development of musical modernism. To many music-lovers he is still a modernist bogeyman, one of the main culprits who knocked music off-course by dragging it, kicking and screaming, into the realms of atonality and serialism. During this anniversary year, even his musical champions have tended to celebrate the occasion with the more... read more

3rd September 2024

Anton Bruckner, the bicentenary of whose birth falls this week, wrote music of extremes: blazing orchestral tuttis and sparsely-textured woodwind solos, extended lyrical outpourings and fragmented thematic cells punctuated by pauses. In its turn, this music seems to prompt either fanatical devotion or downright incomprehension (as it did during Bruckner’s lifetime), all of which – combined with the sheer scale and duration of the symphonies that form the bulk of his output – can make it seem rather forbidding... read more