Idagio—the Spotify for Classical Music—Has Changed My Life

I really don’t mean to get all Music Appreciation 101 on you, but I need to ask: Have you listened to classical lately? On purpose, I mean. A local string quartet playing Vivaldi during cocktail hour at your college roommate’s wedding—or a Mozart piano concerto broadcast through the surprisingly decent sound system at your local gourmet produce market—doesn’t count.

Until quite recently, I listened to a ton of classical music—both live and, more often, on recordings: opera, symphonies, choral works, string quartets, piano trios, and solo pieces, for starters, from a wide range of orchestras and conductors and choruses and performers from around the world as recorded by scores of labels.

What happened? Quite simply, streaming music happened. And here’s where I hear a plaintive lacrimoso recitative: Don’t streaming music services have a wealth of classical offerings?

Yes—and, effectively, no. Both Apple Music and Spotify boast thousands upon thousands of all of the above and more. And they’re wonderful to listen to if you know exactly what you’re looking for. If you don’t—if you’re relying on either of these streaming services to help you discover new composers or new performers or new works, or if you’re looking to use their interface to explore these things on your own—you’re likely out of luck.

It all comes down to metadata. While metadata for most popular music is quite simple—there’s the artist, the song or track, and the album it’s from—classical metadata might encompass everything from the composer, the orchestra, the conductor, the choir (which may have its own director), various soloists, the title of the piece (along with perhaps some sort of number or nomenclature to indicate its place within a larger symphony or work), and an artist’s opus number, or, in the case of composers like Mozart or Bach, whose works are ordered by their own system, their Kochel or BWV number. Not simple.

This isn’t merely a matter for Juilliard students to debate while waiting for rehearsal space. If a streaming service doesn’t have more than three or more fields of dynamic metadata, any browsing or searching you do will be rendered largely pointless. There’s a larger issue of respect at play here as well. If you want to browse by genre in Apple Music, for example, you’re presented with 35 categories to choose from, including African Music, Bollywood, K-Pop, Latino, Música Mexicana, Música Tropical, Pop Latino, Reggae, Rock y Alternativo, Soul/Funk, Urbano Latino, and World—yet 15 centuries of music from around the world, from Gregorian chant and liturgical plainsong through Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner, Stravinsky, Debussy, John Cage, musique concrète, Steve Reich, Iannis Xenakis, Gavin Bryars, Philip Glass, Nico Muhly, and the Boston Pops are all neatly encompassed under a single genre: Classical.

And then there’s this: Browse “Ludwig van Beethoven” under Artists in Apple Music, and you’ll find what seems to be a helpful scroll at the bottom of the screen listing “Similar Artists.” Fair enough—there’s Tchaikovsky, Mozart . . . uh . . . The Philadelphia Orchestra. . . and then, oddly, Chopin. Click on that Chopin and you’ll find not the sublime work of the peerless Frédéric Chopin, who composed music of staggering, heartrending genius, but a song called “Circumstance” by the hip-hop artist J.O. Rodriguez, featuring “Chopin.” (Opening line: “Seems like lately you gotta do everything your daaaaamn self. Can’t ask for no daaaaaamn help.”) Molto agitato!

To compound the insults, have a gander at the “Top Songs” listed under any major composer. Who knew, really, that a highlight of Beethoven’s oeuvre was “Fur Elise Reimagined” by DJ cMellow & Ludwig van Beethoven? And who could have predicted that the second track listed for Mozart would be his “Piano Sonata No. 10 in C Major” as recorded by the virtually unheard-of Pennrose Orchestra on Classical Piano Lullabies Volume 1? (It’s the pastel-color album with a teddy bear on the cover.)

As far as Spotify goes: Take much of the above, with a slightly more user-friendly interface. Tidal? Same, plus a virtually useless search function. Sounds complicated, yes?

The upside of all this: It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s 15 centuries of mind-blowing music out there waiting for you to discover it, or rediscover it, or obsess on it—and it doesn’t require a lick of expertise on your part.

Idagio, launched in the United States and Canada last fall, is a new streaming service focusing solely on classical recordings—but focusing on doing it right. It’s not simply a matter of what they offer (currently over a million tracks, with 20,000 more added each month), but, rather, how they offer it: Idagio’s interface is at once elegant, easy to navigate and understand, and robust in terms of what you can do with it. Searches are a breeze—or if you don’t know just what you’re looking for, you can browse by composers, ensembles, soloists, conductors, instruments, genres, and periods. Still at a loss? Use the Discover-button navigation to find featured new releases, look at what’s popular now, or listen to composer essentials, award-winning albums, or scores and scores of brilliantly curated themed playlists (from “Femme Fatales” and learned explorations of, say, the overture or the toccata to “Child Prodigies” and classical music for children) and exclusive performances and recordings. Save whatever you want to your own playlist, and download anything you want available 24/7. If you’re an audiophile who obsesses about sound quality, you can stream (and download) in lossless format.

Too complicated? There’s a button for that, too. Go to “Moods” navigation, and a circle appears on-screen. Simply put your finger down and twirl the circle to pick any one of the moods that arise: Passionate (a Schumann sonata for violin and piano); Melancholic (a Schubert string quartet); Radiant (some rousing Paganini for violin and orchestra); Gentle (a Scriabin piano sonata); and onward through Exciting, Nervous, Angry, Happy, Relaxed, Peaceful, Optimistic, Joyful, Powerful, Festive, Sad, and Tragic.

Me, I generally know what I’m looking for, though there’s no button for The Opposite of Punk Rock. I listen to enough (mostly) guitar-based music that’s passionate, radiant, exciting, nervous, angry, joyful, and powerful all at once that when I reach for classical music, I’m likely going for some sweet spot in between melancholic, gentle, and tragic—a combination that I consider radiant, joyful, and powerful. Specifically, this usually takes the form of sacred choral music from the 16th and 17th century (I have a 30-year-long fanboy obsession with The Tallis Scholars under the direction of Peter Phillips) and more modern piano music—mainly in forms a bit smaller and quieter than full-on concertos and sonatas—from the likes of Arvo Pärt, Bartók, Messiaen, Satie, Copland, Reich, and Barber.

But has Idagio actually changed my life, or just given me another music-streaming app with which to obsess over and build absurdly specific categorized playlists? A little bit of both, frankly: I’ve found that—particularly with a good pair of noise-canceling headphones—solo piano music is an almost ecstatic counterpoint to a morning-rush-hour subway commute. I’ve discovered that the high-volume, lossless streaming of The Tallis Scholars’s rendition of Allegri’s Miserere transports me to Merton College Chapel at Oxford, where it was recorded, in a way that sets the hairs on my arm on end.

I’ve also started buying more tickets to classical concerts (in particular the brilliantly curated and hauntingly site-specific splendors of the Angel’s Share series, held in the catacombs of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn) and fewer to everything else. And instead of playing air guitar, I’m listening to pieces I used to sing a long time ago—in particular, Mozart’s “Non più andrai” aria from Le Nozze di Figaro, under the weight of which I crashed and burned at state competition in high school—and air-singing them with sublime perfection. (Idagio offers 23 well-annotated recordings of this aria, in recordings from 1937 to 2015, not one of which is from Mozart and Baby Friends Playtime.)

In short: Bravo.