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On the screen before us sits a solid man with a neatly trimmed gray beard and a nearly bald head. Behind dark-rimmed glasses his eyes gleam: one full of cyclopean fury, the other half-closed, as if hinting at some secret. Around him are stands of compact discs, perhaps hundreds of thousands of records, and sometimes, depending on its place in the house, a bronze tom-tom. He speaks quickly and drawlingly, with growling dips in the low register and sharp bursts of indignation or delight. Most often he smiles and sings (often) in a hoarse voice that evokes associations with old Yiddish songs and Hebrew melodies. He is cheerful, indignant, with praise and abuse. Even if Dickens had tried to create an unlikely YouTube star—a classical music critic—he would have struggled to come up with someone as brilliant as David Hurwitz.
Herwitz is the executive editor of the online classical music magazine ClassicsToday. Founded in 1999, the site features reviews of new releases, reissues, books, and concerts; articles on various aspects of the record business and classical repertoire; and diatribes and eulogies by Herwitz. Links to his videos, which he began making for the site in 2020 during the coronavirus lockdown, are also available. He produces an average of three videos a day, and has now created more than four thousand, each lasting between six minutes and an hour. ClassicsToday is partially paywalled, but anyone can watch the videos, and Herwitz’s YouTube channel attracted nearly ten million views last year.
Herwitz’s method is not particularly complicated. He sits at home in front of his MacBook, opens Photo Booth, and begins to talk. He shares his opinions on recordings and musicians, recounts snippets of musical history, and analyzes specific works. (He has, for example, discussed the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony—the “stream scene”—and how some conductors tend to play it too slowly, which ultimately ruins the entire piece.) He cracks silly jokes, plays the clown who ironically attacks clichés and pomposity, and mocks the conservatism of orchestral programmers while creating his own ideal programs. Many of his opinions are unconventional, and are expressed with a casual enthusiasm that is not usually found in the classical music criticism profession, which is known for its modesty and respect, if not its timidity and boredom.
Herwitz has written sixteen books on music (including Beethoven's Orchestral Music: A User's Guide) and can be scholarly and meticulous, devoting individual videos to each of Haydn's 104 symphonies (he's currently up to the 74th). But when he evaluates a recording he finds particularly bad, he can simply say, “That sucks.” Occasionally, grinning with the excitement of a win, he dons what he calls “the white scarf of hopeless impudence” — an actual white scarf — to present the “Escape Like Death” award. (A recent prize was a Sony box set of Bruckner symphonies, with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by the star German conductor Christian Thielemann, “a terrible conductor, except for a few operas.”) “Many people think that criticism should be gentle, delicate, as sophisticated as the art of music itself,” he told me when I visited his home. “I say, ‘Take a pill and try to find a sense of humor.’ Satire and caricature are as important elements of criticism as comedy.”
To the casual viewer of one of Herwitz's videos, the emphasis on such minutiae might seem odd: a pianist's performance of Chopin is good, but not as good as his performance of twenty years earlier. Yet the uninitiated can be swept up in his chatter and judgment, like sportscasters reeling off a performer's old statistics. Who would have thought that one could speak so learnedly but crudely about Mozart, the star sopranos, Herbert von Karajan? Or that the fate of the world—or at least the fate of pleasure—hinges on whether string players soften their vibrato? For those who care at all, they matter enormously.
“Hello, friends,” Herwitz’s webcasts almost always begin, and this easy, friendly greeting is the basis of his style. He assumes that we are interested, addressing both seasoned collectors and digital-age newcomers (to whom it might be worth explaining, very delicately, that a symphony section is not a “song”). His comments are free of snobbery and attempts to simplify. It is clear from the first minutes of his reflections that he is a performer. When I mentioned this to him the first time we met, he seemed very pleased with the obvious. “This is supposed to be a performance,” he said. He spoke in a quiet, even tone that was very
Sourse: newyorker.com
