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Can Dave Hurwitz Save Classical Recording?
An unlikely YouTube star surveys the spoils of an overflowing but precarious industry.
He’s not entirely against it, but at times he describes it as a commercially driven high-brow con: By the end of the sixties, he said, “people were bored, they wanted a new sound.” A cadre of gifted players (in London, Vienna, and other European cities), egged on by the record companies, saw a way of generating hundreds of albums. Back in the seventies, as Hurwitz admits, Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s performance of the Vivaldi chestnut “The Four Seasons” with the Consentus Musicus Wien (extreme tempos, furious attacks) arrived like cold water dashed into your face. The great orchestras in Europe and the United States continue to use modern instruments, but they often employ some degree of “period practice”—reducing the number of strings, for instance, such that a Beethoven symphony comes off as slender and lithe rather than heroically massive, as in Karajan’s old Berlin Philharmonic recordings.
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