The right idea?

I've never bought into the idea of "crossover". While there are a few artists who can manage outside of their primary genre (Eileen Farrell for one), most attempts by opera singers to sing more "popular" music just end up sounding cheesy or ridiculous. And (as I've said at least once before) artists like Andrea Bocelli, Josh Groban and Sarah Brightman, admirable as they might be in one genre, just aren't classical artists.

Peter Gelb, who is shortly to take over the Metropolitan Opera, obviously thinks otherwise (as one can read in this speech). Which of course frightens those of us who patronize that institution. Happily, good news comes from the recent Sony/BMG merger. Gilbert Hetherwick, who will be running the new classical label "Sony BMG Masterworks" thinks that classical can be profitable and without the crutch of crossover. In the article he states:

It's just a question of recording the right repertory, marketing it convincingly and applying the right discipline. And in my view, getting rid of crossover allows people to be focused.

Another thing that struck me was the statement that "Crossover distorts people's values", which is frankly something that I've been saying for a long time. The "Three Tenors" was a fluke and to expect the kind of return as that album achieved is unrealistic. These were three (with Zubin Mehta making four) mature, accomplished artists, pulling together for a special event which, for those of us who love opera proved to be fun and for those who didn't proved that operatic music can be fun. But re-hashing it over and over again turned into self-parody, without the spontaneous enjoyment of the first one. The recording was just a record of that event, which many people assumed wouldn't reoccur and wanted to remember. When it did (ad nauseum), they just got bored.

Let's hope Mr. Hetherwick succeeds and that others have the same kind of courage to trust in the music and in the audience.