Jessye Norman sings Billy Joel

By DAVID BENEDICT

You know what? It's over. It's slash-and-burn time as classical record labels reduce their lists drastically. If you're not a stadium-sized star or nubile enough to be flatteringly photographed semi-deshabille, you can forget it.

Classical repertoire, goodbye. Crossover? Come on down.

Record company executives adore crossover because it bridges the gap between a bunch of difficult divas (of both sexes) and the immeasurably sexy popular market.

You can hear executives clocking the Three Tenors: "Thank God they sang some English stuff, not just that fancy-schmancy stuff in foreign languages. We don't want arias, we want showbiz, we want West Side Story ... "

Ooops. Even Leonard Bernstein came a cropper there. When the original cast recording is so stupendous, why on earth did the composer re-record the show with a bunch of opera singers? The only incontrovertibly good thing about that woefully misbegotten project is the splashy playing of the New York Philharmonic which, under Bernstein's baton, gets down and dirty. Almost everything else is a travesty. Tatiana Troyanos is a fire-eating Anita but even she sounds matronly. Hell, the show is a streetwise rewrite of Romeo and Juliet that was originally entitled Gang Way. What sort of gang do you suppose Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras belong to?

The ghastliness of the enterprise - immortalised in Christopher Swann's documentary of the fraught recording sessions - was gleefully pilloried by French and Saunders with mezzo Sarah Walker coming along for the ride for a gloriously preposterous operatic cover of Kylie Minogue's I Should Be So Lucky.

Yet it's musical snobbery - and nonsense - to believe that all crossover is crass. Reri Grist went from the cast of West Side Story to sing Mozart operas, while Barbara Cook had never sung opera when she landed the coloratura role of Cunegonde in Bernstein's Candide.

That meant singing Glitter and Be Gay, a life-threateningly difficult pastiche of the Jewel Song from Faust, eight times a week. Her perfect vocal and comic interpretation has never been bettered. There are recordings of Broadway material by Eileen Farrell and Dawn Upshaw which belie their classical roots.

Unfortunately, such offerings are rare. When their careers in grand opera start to fade, star sopranos - and not a few tenors - start scrabbling around for less strenuous material. They release albums of jazz and pop standards (Jessye Norman crooning Billy Joel's Just The Way You Are) and tell the world they've loved this stuff all their lives but never had the time to record it.

Oh, really? So how come the results nearly always sound so condescending? They give the impression they are flattering supposedly flimsy material with the glorious lustre of their voice.

The traffic flows in both directions. Opera singers dabble in pop because they want to be popular. Pop artists head towards more risky repertoire because they are after cultural clout.

Take Linda Ronstadt. Suddenly presented with a whole new audience thanks to her unexpected screen appearance in Joe Papp's jazzed-up version of The Pirates of Penzance, she started casting around for new material and wound up with a succession of albums that plundered Tin Pan Alley's greatest. Then, in 1991, Natalie Cole won herself seven Grammys duetting with her dead dad Nat King Cole on her album Unforgettable.

Now everyone's at it, but the problem is style - or, rather, the lack of it. Ronstadt had the good fortune to record with the irreplaceable conductor and arranger Nelson Riddle, who had a lifetime's experience of bringing the best out of greats such as Frank Sinatra. In Ronstadt's case, he spun straw into gold.

That's the secret of crossover success. It doesn't matter what sort of voice you have, just so long as you marry musicianship and material. But too many artists plunge in where angels fear to tread, making forays into territories better left unvisited.

- INDEPENDENT