David Hurwitz

I have never been into video reviews or reviewers, it's a trend that I never became attached to.  It's the end of 2020, the most impossible and backwards year of our lifetimes, and my favourite music channel of the moment is David Hurwitz's on Youtube, it's an absolute treat.

I'm sure there are plenty of classical music reviewers who can communicate in this style, I am surely decades behind whatever the vanguard of classical criticism is these days.  I just love watching a guy who talks about classical music the way my favourite pop and rock critics always did, with pithy and cynical putdowns of conductors and orchestras, cheeky enthusiasm for his faves, and delightful overuse of the word "cosmic" to describe powerful performances.  He mixes a deep knowledge of the music with charismatic humour throughout, and effortlessly succeeds at the single most important task of a critic in any genre -- he makes me want to drop everything and listen to the music he's talking about.

And again I'm no expert, but I strongly disagree with him on the subject of a particular recording I have thought about quite a bit -- Furtwaengler's singular 1942 recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in Berlin with many top Nazis in attendance.  Nearly everything Hurwitz says is true -- the recording is poor, and the performance has many noticeable flaws.  Despite this, I still love it, as do many of the people who posted in the comments box.  Hurwitz isn't a perfectionist and is happy to judge a piece more by "feel" if appropriate. He believes that if you strip away the context, it's not a recording that you would ever listen to more than once.  But stripping away the context is impossible.  The Nazis were there and nothing could be more important.  I believe, as many do, that Furtwangler decided to make an emphatic point by presenting the blitzkrieg version of Beethoven's 9th, spitting in the face of the Nazis in attendance, and telling them to shove their war in a manner that very few in Germany could have hoped to get away with while living to tell about it.