HenrysRecords.org
A Searchable Database of Classical Music Recordings
Last updated on 1 May 2016
Please read the detailed instructions if this is your first time.
(If you're looking for the Henry's Records store in Staffordshire, England, they're over at henrysrecords.co.uk)
All searches are case-insensitive. Only family names are used: search for Beethoven, not Ludwig van Beethoven. All spellings are anglicized according to whatever convention we felt was, well, most conventional :-), e.g., Furtwangler not Furtwängler (or just use furtw to play it safe). Search for symphonies and concertos using a format like this: Symphony No. 4 or Concerto for Violin No. 3.
NOTE: Articles like a, the, le, la, der, die, das, and so on are not included at the front of titles in any language. For example, search for Mahler's "Lied von der Erde", not "Das Lied von der Erde".
|
[1] Timings can be expressed as
ranges; for example, four possible timings are:
5:22, >3:30, <=3:30 , or 12:00-15:00
All timings are of the form minutes:seconds. To
search for a piece longer than two hours thirty seconds, you
would type >120:30 .
Search in which categories? Orchestral Instrumental/Chamber Songs Operas
Results in what format? HTML (more readable) Plain text (better for saving and processing)
Below, you can download all the raw data contained in the database. This data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0; you are free to use it for any purpose, including commercial purposes, so long as you abide by the terms of that license. The files are in an XML format designed to be both human-readable and machine-parseable:
To generate tabular reports — for example, if you're Henry and you're preparing a Collector's Corner program — please visit the reports page.
For the technically inclined, here are some notes on how the data and website are managed.
HenrysRecords.org is an online catalogue of Henry Fogel's record library.
Henry is Dean of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, former President of the League of American Orchestras, and former President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He has been collecting records for many decades. All areas of classical music are well-represented in the collection, but it is particularly strong in early- and mid-twentieth-century operatic and vocal recordings, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, and several obscure composers you probably haven't heard of unless you collect them too. I'm Henry's son Karl, and a lifelong beneficiary of the collection. Starting in the late 1980's, we began entering the records into a computer database. After a multi-year cataloguing spree, the whole thing was done, and Henry has kept it up to date ever since as he acquires new recordings. Unfortunately, the one area that still hasn't made it into the catalogue is his opera aria recordings (discs generally devoted to one singer performing a variety of arias and songs), which are a major portion of the collection. He's not ruling out all hope of getting those finished someday, but it is a formidable task because each song on each disc must be typed in by hand, and some of the discs hold ten or twenty arias.
We make no guarantees about the accuracy of the data here, of course, but we try to run a tight ship. If you find any errors, or have suggestions on how to make the site more useful, please contact us.