The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

A Slice of History

7th June 2023

What do we listen to when we play a record? It might seem like a stupid question with an obvious answer. But think about it a little and ponder: are we listening to a performance, to a carefully manufactured and stage-managed simulacrum of a performance, or a mere approximation/imitation/echo of performance? What we hear when the disc starts spinning is a set of information, put together by musicians, producers and engineers, artists’ managers and label executives, often carefully marketed to appeal to our tastes. The very... read more

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Celebrating Ligeti

31st May 2023

Last weekend marked the centenary of the birth of one of 20th-century music’s most distinctive composers: Györy Ligeti. Born on 28 May 1923 in Dicsőszentmárton, Transylvania, into a Jewish family with an artistic background (the violinist Leopold Auer was a great-uncle), he studied music under Ferenc Farkas before being called up to the wartime labour corps of the Nazis’ Hungarian puppet government in 1944 (most of his family perished in concentration camps and gas chambers). Resuming his studies in September 1945,... read more

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300 Years Ago in Leipzig...

27th May 2023

One of this year’s more remarkable but less heralded musical anniversaries falls on 30 May. On that date 300 years ago, Johann Sebastian Bach began his tenure as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, having moved from Cöthen with his growing family (including his recently wed second wife, Anna Magdalena) the previous weekend. The application for the Leipzig post was an unusually protracted one. Following the death in the previous of the previous Thomaskantor, Johann Kuhnau (1660–1722), Bach had applied for the post – regarded as the... read more

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Reading Music

17th May 2023

The recent news that primary school children in England now rank fourth for reading in an international literacy table has been announced in the media this week with much fanfare, and is to be welcomed (even if Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are not yet part of the same table). Those interested in the arts, however, may wonder what the result would be like in equivalent rankings of musical literacy. Ever since being sidelined in the National Curriculum, the fate of music in the British education system has been a... read more

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Of Coronations, Monarchs, and Final Curtains

10th May 2023

Our recent suggestions for an alternative coronation playlist generated a fair amount of interest and debate from our regular correspondents. One of them noted the omission of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643): a grievous oversight on our part! Though the attribution of the music solely to Monteverdi remains contested, this last work from the great Cremonan pioneer of opera is a significant milestone in the early development of the genre. One of the first operas on an historical (as opposed to... read more

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