The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

2026: A Year of Resolve?

6th January 2026

The beginning of the New Year typically brings a mixture of hopes and fears as we look forward to what is to come in the months and years ahead. If the end of the old year is often a time of reflection, early January brings (like the run-up to Christmas) a mood of anticipation, although the joyful focus of the Advent season is usually replaced by more worldly concerns, as well as self-examination. Often, it may simply be a need to shed the extra pounds put on over the festive season, but New Year’s resolutions can of course... read more

read more

2025: A Year of Celebrations and Challenges

17th December 2025

This year has been a memorable but also testing one for classical music. The past twelve months have seen a succession of notable anniversaries, marked with varying degrees of prominence, for composers ranging from Palestrina and Gibbons, via Bizet, Ravel, Satie and Shostakovich, to the modernist giants Boulez and Berio. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Palestrina and Gibbons have been celebrated with less fanfare than might have been hoped (early music is still viewed by many as a ‘niche’ interest), a more comprehensive... read more

read more

100 Years of Berg’s Wozzeck

10th December 2025

Musicologists and critical theorists would have us acknowledge that there’s no such thing as an ‘uncontested masterpiece’. Nevertheless, I’d argue the case for at least three in early modernist opera: Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1908), Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1918), and Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1925). What’s remarkable about them (as well as being each composer’s first and – in two cases – only opera) is that, alongside the more accessible verism of Puccini and late Romanticism of Richard Strauss, they have each... read more

read more

Christmas Focus: Charpentier’s Messe de minuit

3rd December 2025

This month’s Christmas edition of BBC Music magazine takes a wry look at the festive pieces that critics love to hate. This is the time of year when reviewers are bombarded with a steady supply of Yuletide releases. It is little wonder that years of over-exposure to some pieces – almost all from the Anglo-German Christmas traditions – should engender strong feelings in music journalists (just as the ever-earlier appearance of Christmas merchandise and decorations in shops regularly prompts feelings of exasperation in many... read more

read more

Pulling the Plug on Music

26th November 2025

No-one with any interest in the wider plight of the arts and humanities in British universities will fail to have noticed the brutal wave of cuts currently being proposed at the University of Nottingham (UoN), which has hit the headlines in the past month. Among the staggering 48 courses under threat of closure (and with new applications currently suspended) are not only modern languages but also theology and (less esoterically) some nursing programmes. But it is the proposed axing of music degrees that has been greeted with... read more

read more