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Can Dave Hurwitz Save Classical Recording? An unlikely YouTube star surveys the spoils of an overflowing but precarious industry. By David Denby July 20, 2025 Illustrated portrait of David Hurwitz Illustration by Luis Mazón He sits squarely in front of us on the screen, a full-bodied man with a carefully trimmed white beard and a nearly bald head, his eyes looming behind dark-framed glasses—one eye glaring with cyclopean fury, the other with lid at half-mast, as if signalling a secret of some sort. Behind and around him stand solid walls of CDs—perhaps a hundred thousand disks—and sometimes, depending on where he is sitting in his house, a bronze tam-tam. He speaks rapidly, voluminously, with growling dips into the lower register and high-pitched flights of indignation or rapture. He tends to be smiling, and sings (often) in a scratchy voice redolent of old Yiddish songs and Hebrew chants. He is merry, outraged, laudatory, abusive. If Dickens had set about creating an improbable Y...