The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

More Reissues from the Archives: BBC Legends Vol.4

25th October 2023

ICA Classics’ no-frills repackaging of releases from the BBC Legends series really is the gift that keeps on giving. The first two boxes of 20 discs apiece soon became sought-after collectors’ items, while the third was a huge hit with our customers earlier this year. All recordings come from the mind-bendingly vast BBC archives, and while the sound quality varies from just-about-acceptable mono to vivid, state-of-the-art stereo, and live performances occasionally feature intrusive audience noise, these discs – all... read more

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The Finnish Question: Three Ms - Sibelius’s Younger Contemporaries

18th October 2023

Sometimes a distinctive musical personality can come to typify the picture of a nation’s music to the exclusion of most of their contemporaries: think of Elgar’s prominence in British music at the turn of the last century. The situation in a less populous country such as Finland can be even more marked. Sibelius was by far the most dominant figure in Finnish classical music during the first half of the 20th century, despite the fact that for the last 30 years of his life – until his death in 1957 at the age of 91 – he wrote... read more

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The Finnish Question: Broader Perspectives

11th October 2023

The extent to which national identities overlap with broader regional trends is nowhere more apparent than in the Nordic countries: the Scandinavian trio of Denmark, Sweden and Norway plus Finland and Iceland. While each has managed to forge a separate musical identity – the distinctiveness of which varies from composer to composer – they share characteristics rooted in the region’s political and religious history and, more recently, in the shared Nordic models of social democracy. In his brilliant recent study of Nordic... read more

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Works in Focus: Sibelius’s Tapiola

4th October 2023

Like his symphonies, Sibelius’s tone poems stand as milestones across his compositional career, from the early En saga (1892, rev. 1902) and Spring Song (1894–95) via the overtly nationalist Finlandia (1899) to such later works as The Bard, Luonnotar (both 1913) and The Oceanides (1914). Over the course of these works Sibelius took a quintessentially Germanic genre with origins in the symphonic poems of Liszt and turned it into something uniquely and powerfully Finnish, capturing both the mythology and the landscapes of his... read more

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The Finnish Question: Before Sibelius

27th September 2023

To appreciate the impact of the changes that came over Finnish music from the early 20th century onwards, one must delve into the country’s past. From the mid-13th century, the Finnish lands – including Lapland to the north, Ostrobothnia in the west and centre, and Karelia in the east – were under Swedish rule. Thus, while the Christianisation of the region dates back to at least the 11th century (with the first missions there rather earlier), the growing Swedish influence in the 12th century ensured that the form of... read more

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