The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

Amelia Freedman: Champion of the New and Neglected

30th July 2025

The name itself may not mean much to many record collectors, but Amelia Freedman, who has died at the age of 84, was co-founder of the Nash Ensemble, a flexible chamber grouping with a nucleus of wind and string quintets plus piano and harp, which she directed for six decades. As such, she was responsible for drawing to the attention of the record-buying public not just such relatively neglected figures as Hummel and Spohr, but a dazzling array of contemporary composers from Julian Anderson to Judith Weir, and important... read more

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Remembering Norrington

22nd July 2025

Only the most wilfully conservative sceptics could deny that Roger Norrington, who died last week at the age of 91, had a profound impact on the ‘Early Music’ revolution of the last 50 years. Through his work with the London Classical Players (the period instrument orchestra he founded in 1978) and then with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (1998–2011) he not only shook up playing standards and values in repertoire ranging from the Baroque to the 20th century, but also brought a mischievous joy to music-making as well... read more

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Label Focus: Chandos

15th July 2025

In a time of increasing uncertainty and change for some high-profile record labels, the good news is that Chandos Records, founded in 1979 by the late Brian Couzens, continues to thrive since its acquisition over a year ago by Klaus Heymann (founder and owner of the Naxos group). Of course, it’s too early to tell what the long-term effects of this transfer might be, but the assurances of independence from Heymann and the continued leadership of the label by Couzens’s son Ralph, together with an uninterrupted recording... read more

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The Second-hand Bug

8th July 2025

One of the banes in the life of any collector of recorded music is the frequent non-availability of items from the back catalogue. We’ve lost count of the number of times when Radio 3’s ‘Building a Library’ or Gramophone’s ‘Collection’ has heaped praise on its top choice, only for it to show as unavailable except for download or as part of some vast compilation box. And, with many labels now manufacturing in smaller quantities than before, some titles seem to have very limited availability, even when not expressly designated... read more

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Erik Satie: 100 Years On

2nd July 2025

Of all the eccentrics and ‘outsiders’ who pepper the history of Western art music, one of the most fascinating is Erik Satie, who died 100 years ago, on 1 July 1925, at the age of 59. Shunning the conventional goal-directedness of late-19th-century Romantic music, his often disarmingly simple but tellingly inflected compositions anticipated later trends such as neo-classicism and minimalism, often by many decades. His early piano lessons with the local organist in his native Honfleur, Normandy, instilled a love of medieval... read more

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