HenrysRecords.org
A Searchable Database of Classical Music Recordings
Data last updated on 15 December 2023
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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. Just use family names for people: for example, search for Beethoven, not Ludwig van Beethoven. The catalog is inconsistent about given names, but the surname is always there, so searching for just the surname will match either way. We use English spellings with no accented letters: for example, if you're looking for the composer Hans Gál, search for Gal. Spellings are anglicized according to whatever convention we felt was, well, most conventional: it's Furtwangler, not Furtwängler nor Furtwaengler (but just use a substring like “furtw” to avoid the issue entirely).
Symphonies are titled like, e.g., Symphony No. 4, concertos like Concerto for Violin No. 3, and similarly with sonatas and other countable series. Articles such as a, the, le, la, der, die, das, etc are not included at the front of titles in any language. For example, it's Mahler's "Lied von der Erde", or occasionally "Lied von der Erde, Das", but never "Das Lied von der Erde". Again, substring searches are your friend.
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[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)
To generate tabular reports — for example, if you're Henry and you're preparing a Collector's Corner program — please visit the reports page.
You can download the full dataset. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0, meaning that you are free to use the data for any purpose, including commercial purposes, so long as you abide by the terms of that license. The files are in a simple XML format that is designed to be both human-readable and machine-parseable:
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 former 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 (you might enjoy this interview with him from his time at the CSO). 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 unjustly neglected composers and performers who I'm sure you would agree deserve wider exposure if only I would name them here, which I won't because can you imagine the reader mail it would generate if the list didn't include someone's favorite? Oy vey. Let's not even go there.
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 entered by hand, and some of the discs hold ten or twenty arias.
We make no guarantees about the accuracy of the data here, but we try to run a tight ship. If you find any errors, or have suggestions on how to make the site more useful, or just want to tell us how you're using the site, please contact us.
See also various collections containing classical music at the Internet Archive, such as:
