The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

Three new Handel albums

24th August 2022

Although the English took Handel to their heart almost as soon as his first visit at the age of 25 in 1710, and increasingly from 1712 when he permanently relocated there, he’s by no means solely ‘English property’. His birth in Halle and employment (however brief) at the court of Hanover endowed him with a fundamentally Germanic and Protestant cultural identity, while his early travels to Italy – and Rome in particular – left their unmistakable mark on his compositional development, particularly the ease with which he wrote... read more

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Taruskin’s Legacy; Recent Opera Controversies

17th August 2022

Richard Taruskin, who died last month at the age of 77, was one of the dominant figures in musicology of the last 40 years. Born on 2 April 1945 into a Jewish family of Russian heritage, in his early years he studied cello, then went on to study music at Columbia University, preparing his PhD on neglected Russian opera of the 19th century under the guidance of his mentor, Paul Henry Lang. Lang’s own magnum opus, Music in Western Civilization (1941) was among the first books to place classical music in its wider social and... read more

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A Question of Taste

10th August 2022

One of the droller jokes to do the rounds during the COVID-19 pandemic was the teasing of friends that they wouldn’t know if they had the illness, as they never had any taste in the first place. When we talk of artistic ‘taste’, we touch on an enormous subject. It can refer, like the taste of food we eat, to a purely sensory experience: whether we find the music (or poetry, or painting, or film…) appealing, sweet, vibrant, sour, and so on. But it can also reflect a dimension that verges on the moral: we often refer not just... read more

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Music Makers: Reinhard Goebel and Musica Antiqua Köln

3rd August 2022

Released to coincide with Reinhard Goebel’s 75th birthday, Deutsche Grammophon have gathered together all the recordings he made for Archiv Produktion with his own ensemble, Musica Antiqua Köln, between 1977 and 2004. It’s a mouthwateringly substantial box: 75 discs in all, housed in handsome ‘original jackets’ sleeves reflecting the gradual changes in Archiv’s house style between the late 1970s and the first years of the new millennium. With so many works of short, multiple tracks, the booklet is largely given over to a... read more

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Have we reached ‘Peak Mahler’?

27th July 2022

With a new cycle of the complete symphonies recently launched by Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic on Pentatone, and another – from Ádám Fischer and the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker on C-Avi – finished a few months back, the recording industry’s love affair with Mahler’s music shows no signs of diminishing. At a conservative estimate, the number of conductors who have set down the full cycle is at least 25, among whom a select few (Bernstein, Maazel) have tackled it twice on disc. Several others have... read more

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