Hoopla expands big into classical music

Free music service is suddenly strong on modern Russian composers

If you have a library card in the United States, it’s likely that you have access to Hoopla, a streaming service offered by the vast majority of public libraries.

Hoopla offers access to movies, TV show episodes, digital comic books, documentaries and audiobooks. But what I want to talk about here is the service’s music recordings.

It has always offered plenty of classical music. But Hoopla’s classical music offerings have suddenly become much stronger.

It recently added the Naxos catalog. And it also has added Northern Flowers, a Russian music label, and has added other independent classical music labels, such as Grand Piano.

Adding such labels shores up what has been, from my point of view, a significant weakness of Hoopla’s: Lack of access to many of the works of modern Russian composers.

I love Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and Hoopla always has had plenty of their music. But this Substack newsletter is largely about less prominent but also talented composers such as Alexander Mosolov, Gavriil Popov, Nikolai Roslavets and Boris Tishchenko. (If Mosolov, Popov and Roslavets are unfamiliar names to you, see this interview.)

Until now, the best way to use a library card to access music written by those composers has been Freegal, the other main streaming music service offered by public libraries.

Note that if you don’t want to pay a monthly fee for a streaming music service such as Spotify, your best bet to get music for free is to make sure you have access to both Hoopla and Freegal. The two services have little overlap, because they make their deals with different record companies. So, for example, in classic rock, Hoopla has the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney and Elton John, but Freegal has Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam and Bob Dylan.

In the Cleveland, Ohio, area, which I live, it’s easy to get access to both services: Cleveland Public Library has Freegal, and Cuyahoga County Public Library has Hoopla, and I have library cards for both libraries. In other places, you may have to scramble a bit to get library cards so you can access both.

As for the Russian composers which are my specialty, Mosolov, Popov, Roslavets and Tishchenko are fairly well represented on Freegal, but had little presence on Hoopla until recently. For example, Tishchenko was represented on Hoopla by one work, a cello concerto.

And now? Many of Tishchenko’s symphonies, piano sonatas and chamber works are on Hoopla. That’s mostly because of the addition of music from the Northern Flowers record label, but also because of the addition of Naxos. If you are new to Tishchenko, the Eighth Symphony, only about 19 minutes long, is a good place to start, and Hoopla has the Naxos recording, featuring the St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Yuri Serov.

Similarly, Mosolov, Popov and Roslavets are all now decently covered on Hoopla. For example, this recording has Popov’s two most acclaimed works, his First Symphony (banned by the Stalinist regime) and his chamber symphony. Mosolov is now represented by this collection, which includes his best-known work, the “Iron Foundry,” and his first piano concerto, and by a recording of all of his piano music, by the Russian pianist Olga Andryushchenko, and other Mosolov recordings also are available.

The addition of Naxos fills other holes, not just my pet interest in Russian music. Naxos is strong in modern composers, particularly Americans, and so many modern composers who were poorly represented on Hoopla now have a decent presence.

Hoopla is not perfect. The tags for particular recordings of classical music often omit a composer’s name. So, for example, if you get interested in Boris Tishchenko, you can’t just search for his name, as Hoopla will only show you some of the recordings. You have to find the listing for Naxos recordings on Hoopla and scroll down to the “T” names. (Because there are so many Naxos recordings, it’s easiest to do this if you select Z-A listings for Naxos on Hoopla.) You’ll also need to find all of the recordings listed on Hoopla for Northern Flowers, and then scroll down for the Tishchenko albums. (Once you find something you want on Hoopla, you can bookmark it for later listening, so you don’t have to hunt it up again.)

But while Hoopla does have room for improvement, that’s not what I want to emphasize today. While Hoopla always had lots of classical music, the recent expansion makes it a really rich source of music for classical music fans. If you want access to a rich library of classical music that costs you nothing, check out Hoopla.