Musical Rabbit Holes for Your Exploration
Bird-Bolts and Cannon-Bullets, No. 28
We all have our stories of how we coped as we isolated ourselves in the spring of 2020: sourdough starters, TV bingeing, gardening, birdwatching, etc., etc. In my case, I was actually busier than normal during the spring semester, since I was trying to move in-person courses online with inadequate tech. But once summer arrived, I had an opportunity to indulge some personal obsessions.
Chief among these was spending hours, days, weeks listening to music. I’ve always done this, but this time I was going deeper: not just listening to, say, Mahler’s Third Symphony but listening to ten different recordings and comparing them. For several years, I had been documenting and making notes on all of my listening, but now I ramped this up. I consulted reviews from the Penguin guide and other sources, but I found that I often disagreed with them.
Some time in 2020, though I can’t pinpoint the date, I discovered Dave Hurwitz’s YouTube channel, which is today’s “Stack” of the Week (quotation marks because it’s not actually a Substack). Dave has been reviewing records for many different publications for decades and is now the executive editor of Classics Today, in my view the most dependable classical music review site.
Dave’s channel is as low-tech as they come; he just talks to the camera, usually positioned in front of walls full of CDs, and he does little to no editing. But that’s fine, because he’s plenty entertaining just talking—and amazingly informative. He knows more about the history of recorded classical music than probably anyone else alive, and he generously shares this knowledge every day, to the tune of over 3200 videos over the past four years.
Curious about Haydn string quartets? Dave has a video (or several). Want to know what the best recordings are of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony? Dave has a video. Interested in Verdi? Dave has a bunch of videos. He has essentially created a video encyclopedia of the history of classical music recordings, and he will send you down hundreds of different rabbit holes. Just let your whims guide you.
New to the world of classical music? Dave has a whole series of videos for you.
Interested in finding reference recordings? Dave has recently started such a series.
Want to explore the major symphony cycles? Dave has multiple videos on all of them—Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams, Mahler, Sibelius, Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, Dvorak, Nielsen, Bruckner, etc., etc.
Want a guided tour through all of Haydn’s symphonies? Dave is up to number 53.
And here’s the thing: he’s almost always right. Very occasionally I might disagree with him, but when he says that a recording is good, it is good. And his knowledge is so deep that he has introduced me to literally hundreds of recordings that I may never have tried otherwise. Here’s a short selection of many recordings that are now favorites that I learned about originally from Dave: the Kubelik Mahler cycle, the Blomstedt Sibelius symphony cycle, the Smetana Quartet’s Beethoven cycle, the Festetics Quartet’s Haydn cycle, Paavo Jarvi’s Rimsky-Korsakov recordings, the music of Florence Price, Charles Mackerras’s early recordings. Great conductors that Dave introduced me to: Constantin Silvestri, Paavo Berglund, Gerard Schwarz, Igor Markevitch, Herbert Blomstedt, JoAnn Falletta, and many others.
While I’m happy, dear reader, to provide you with my humble opinions regarding classical music and to make some listening suggestions, I am, by comparison, a dabbler. If you really want to go deep, you should watch Dave’s channel. Here are a few examples of his videos to get you started:
That’s just a start. Delve into his channel anywhere that interests you, and you will find yourself diving down plenty of rabbit holes for the foreseeable future.
The graduate students have the week off, so there is no featured grad-student post today. I’ll be back on Wednesday with part two of Prince and the Icelandic sagas.
Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet baton to yours.
John, I really appreciate you pointing us in the direction of these videos. I love classical music but am not knowledgeable about it. This is exactly the sort of thing I have been looking for.
It is alway good to have a guide.