The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

Liszt and the Romantic Virtuoso

6th April 2022

Music’s very particular nature as a performing art ensured it a unique place in the Romantic era. Whether as a vehicle for representation at various levels or as an embodiment of the period’s concern with artistic organicism, the fact that it unfolded in time meant that it highlighted certain aspects of artistic activity and ‘performativity’ over others. And surely none is more redolent of the era than the rise of the virtuoso. Earlier periods had their own virtuoso performers, especially with the emergence during the... read more

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Romantic roots and the early Romantics

29th March 2022

While the wider Romantic movement, in philosophy and literature, has its roots in the revolutionary late-Enlightenment thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, the beginnings of musical Romanticism are harder to pinpoint. The conventional view has Beethoven and Schubert, the last great exponents of Viennese Classicism, as ‘transitional’ figures, before the full-blown early Romanticism of such figures as Chopin, Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Schumann. During his lifetime, however, not only was Beethoven regarded as a... read more

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Musical Romanticism: Prologue

29th March 2022

It is the musical period that still comfortably outnumbers all others in terms of commercial recordings and airtime on classical radio stations. The Romantic era encompasses the music of well over a century, although the 19th century was undoubtedly its heyday. Its early roots lay in classicism (much as the wider Romantic movement in the arts, philosophy and politics had its origins in 18th-century Enlightenment rationalism), while its late blossoming in the hands of such figures as Richard Strauss and Sergei Rachmaninov... read more

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More on Ukraine, the power of music... and Tchaikovsky

16th March 2022

Few people can have been prepared for – or unmoved by – the grim stories that have dominated news headlines for the past three weeks. At times such as these the arts can seem, paradoxically, both self-indulgently frivolous, and yet more necessary and inspirational than ever. One of the more extraordinary films to have emerged online is of a Ukrainian mother, Irina Maniukina, playing for one last time on her white, now dust-covered grand piano in the rubble of her shelled-out apartment in Bila Tserkva, some 80km south of... read more

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International Women’s Day: Some Recent Recordings

8th March 2022

With origins over a century ago, and first held on its current calendar date of 8 March in 1914, International Women’s Day was adopted by the United Nations in the mid-1970s, having previously been a largely socialist and communist day of activism. Now it is celebrated worldwide to mark the achievements and aspirations of women everywhere, with some countries recognising it as an official holiday. And it thus seems as good a day as any to highlight some recent notable releases focusing on music by women composers. Since we... read more

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