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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Rutland
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Does Simon Cowell want Rhydian to win?
Have a look at this article from 1st January 1 2006 and ask yourself the question "Does Simon Cowell want Rhydian to win?" and vote in the poll.
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The Classical Crossover Conundrum AVID MILLER, a 32-year-old American tenor on the brink of making his Metropolitan Opera debut, received a call to audition not long ago. The project involved, he had heard, "opera singers not singing opera."
Mr. Miller, who studied at Oberlin Conservatory and had years of repertory under his belt, aced the audition and landed a spot in Il Divo, the hunky Armani-clad vocal group assembled by Simon Cowell, the musical impresario best known as the acid-tongued judge on "American Idol." Mr. Miller's detour from a more conventional classical path to the pop superhighway, where he now sings operatic renditions of "My Way" and "Unbreak My Heart" in Italian, leaves him shaking his head in wonder.
"In the opera world," Mr. Miller said, "you make a recording, then you go back to singing opera. This was a minimum four-year commitment to see if the first album would go. So here we are almost two years and three albums later, and it's going gangbusters." Il Divo's debut album has sold nearly five million copies - nearly a million in the United States this year alone, according to Billboard magazine.
The degree of the group's success is extreme, but its story is by no means unique. The quartet sits atop the musical domain known as classical crossover, an odd and sprawling genre that offers classically trained singers a lucrative detour from traditional concert repertory and practice.
This is the high season for crossover music. But despite its huge popularity (by comparison, "The 5 Browns," one of the past year's best-selling straight classical albums, sold only 60,000 copies), it is often ignored by the critics, or dismissed as market-tested gloss and airy sex appeal.
But the category is more complex than that. Sometimes, for better or worse, the music originates in the corporate boardroom; other times it echoes the countless permutations that arose on their own and continue to echo throughout the world.
Classical crossover has its own chart in Billboard. On the magazine's crossover chart last month, Il Divo occupied the two top slots, its recent "Christmas Collection" at No. 1 followed by the first album (with "Il Divo Gift Pack" further down at No. 12).
After that, things get even more eclectic. The chart includes John Williams's soundtrack to "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith" and Dario Marianelli's for "Pride & Prejudice." There are albums like "You've Stolen My Heart" by the Kronos Quartet and the singer Asha Bhosle, in which the adventurous string quartet delves into Indian film music via the Bollywood songs of R. D. Burman. And there is the debut of the East Village Opera Company, a six-member band that performs, along with a chamber orchestra, famous operatic arias as rock 'n' roll. Helping round out the list are collections by crossover superstars like the self-taught Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli and the English soprano Sarah Brightman.
As a commercial tag, crossover troubles many in the classical recording business. "Firstly, I don't like the word 'crossover,' " said Robina Young, vice president of the Los Angeles-based Harmonia Mundi USA label. "It implies that there are barriers between one thing and another to be jumped over, and I don't believe those barriers exist anymore. Secondly, as a company, in 47 years of existence, I promise you that not one single time has anyone sat down and thought, 'Let's make a crossover record.' "
Many who make classical crossover music resist the idea that their music stems from the cigar-chomping designs of record executives. Tyley Ross, the lead male singer of the East Village Opera Company, first began to revisit arias as rock songs after a film producer asked him to devise "some unconventional manner" to record Italian opera arias for a soundtrack. "We never thought it would appeal to people, it was so left field," Mr. Ross said. "It caught us more by surprise. It was all accidental." (The other extreme might be the English provocateur-producer Malcolm McLaren, who on his 1984 collection "Fans" sought to sell the sublimity of Puccini's greatest hits as electronic dance music.)
The East Village Opera Company, said Chris Roberts, the chief executive of Universal Classics, was "its own thing, from the beginning." Mr. Roberts also works with Elvis Costello, who does not use the term "classical crossover" but who has explored the phenomenon. His 2003 production of "For the Stars," by the Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, met with acclaim. Mr. Roberts, for his part, has overseen albums ranging from straight classical to the pop-classical recordings of the female string quartet Bond.
"I have always had to walk in that delicate gray zone between those things that some would consider the scourge of the earth and others say is the future of music," Mr. Roberts said. "It can be awkward at times. But I think that if you focus on quality as much as you can, then that's always the saving grace."
The masterminded act has certainly not disappeared. Il Divo, one of whose producers has also worked with the Backstreet Boys, is Exhibit A - a boy-bandish variant of the model pioneered by José Carreras, Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti in their commercially formidable Three Tenors venture in 1990.
"Basically Simon spotted a gap in the market for these kinds of acts," said Robbie Macintosh, a senior vice president of Sony BMG in Britain, referring to Mr. Cowell. "He then went about finding singers from around the world - one from the U.S., one Spanish, one French, one Swiss. When we had done these auditions and put the act together, he then put the songs together, which we were all involved in. And off we went."
Mr. Macintosh noted that Il Divo never worked in the classical field and therefore has not crossed over literally. He said the group offers "pop songs with a classical twist."
Before joining Il Divo, Mr. Miller, the American tenor, had sung opera internationally for a decade. He says leaving its traditional realm amounted to "a tough decision, definitely." He credits his work with the director Baz Luhrmann in the Broadway production of "La Bohème" with expanding his thinking.
"His idea was, there is this great music out there, but it's in the hands of the Opera Club," Mr. Miller said. "He wanted to bring that more back into mainstream, make it popular again, make great romance and good melodies and good singing back into fashion."
Il Divo explores a pop communion with traditional opera akin to the work of Italian singer-songwriters like Lucio Dalla and Mango in the 1970's and 80's. "We're looking at creating a new style of music," Mr. Miller said. "It's not exactly crossover; we're not opera. We're blending vocal techniques, as well as repertoire."
For Robert Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch Records (and no fan of boardroom schemes), "There is a natural sense of what people call crossover that's a very organic thing that has been around for the last 30 years, which has to do with a generation of people who have all grown up with this incredible panorama of music around them."
The Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer John Harbison, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees crossover as "very much not a recent question." What has changed in recent years, Mr. Harbison said, is the technology.
"We've always had music of various types, genres and intents," he said. "The audiences for all music had to simply just get there. Now, in the communications age, the opportunities for cross-pollination are tremendous."
The pianist Christopher O'Riley said, "I think crossover in general as a commercial term has been a bad designation of something that has an awfully long history to it." On his most recent collections, "True Love Waits" and "Hold Me to This," Mr. O'Riley plays transcriptions of Radiohead songs. He conjures the image of "Beethoven, Mozart, sitting down at a dinner party, playing the popular aria of the day."
"Beethoven was probably better known as an improviser until people started paying attention to his symphonies," Mr. O'Riley said. "Liszt, taking Hungarian folk songs and making them into these orchestral piano fantasies. Bartok used the raw building blocks of popular music as the way he set up major pieces of art. And then Stravinsky would lift them whole cloth."
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Source: New York Times
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25-11-2007, 08:35 PM
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