David Hurwitz.
In Monday’s (7/20) New Yorker, David Denby writes, “If Dickens had set about creating an improbable YouTube star—a classical-music-record critic—even he might not have come up with anyone as vivid as David Hurwitz. Hurwitz is the executive editor of the online classical-music magazine ClassicsToday. Founded in 1999, the website publishes reviews of new releases, re-releases, books, and concerts; articles on aspects of the recording business and the classical repertoire; and Hurwitz’s diatribes and panegyrics. It also features links to his videos … Averaging three a day, he has by now made more than four thousand … Last year Hurwitz’s YouTube channel received almost ten million visits…. He offers opinions of recordings and musicians, bits of music history, and analyses of specific works…. He will make silly jokes, acting the buffoon in an ironic assault on clichés and pomposity … Many of his opinions are unorthodox and expressed with a freewheeling exuberance … Hurwitz has written sixteen books about music … and can be scholarly and exhaustive, devoting separate videos to each of Haydn’s hundred and four symphonies … Hurwitz is not obsessed with the live performances that absorb most critics. His obsession is with the innumerable recordings that have been issued in the past seventy-five years or so—a glorious panoply of changing musical taste.”
