OperaBabes

You gotta love a press release that includes the following statement: "Gen-exer's have little to no exposure to any form of classical music. Artists are crossing over to reach broader audiences-and it's working. Bond, Vanessa Mae and Lara St. John are the new generation of classical musicians and they are a bunch of hotties!" I'll be the first to admit that the classical music world isn't a pretty place; the stuffy, half-filled concert halls are brimming with gray facial hair and thick eyeglasses. Onstage, things are no better: I've never been able to figure out how musicians required to wear head-to-toe black can look so unchic. Armani anyone? It's one of the occupational hazards of this profession; I just close my eyes and listen to the music.

The OperaBabes are a twentysomething duet that look like they stepped out of Absolutely Fabulous. They're cartoons of a marketing department's idea of what "babes" should look like: over-the-top requisite blondes, one with stick-straight hair, the other permed just-so. Their eyebrows have been perfectly sculpted so that they arch in unnatural ways. On the CD, they are photographed for every page, sometimes puckering up for the camera, other times airbrushed into surrealistic soft-fog, blue-sky landscapes. Here they're melding with the moon, there they're wearing matching miniskirts, fishnet stockings and mid-calf black leather boots against stark-white seamless paper. Flip a few pages and they're more casual, one with a black turtleneck, the other with a t-shirt and a bare midriff. On the back of the booklet, they're both wearing animal prints with wind-blown hair. Their images appear a total of 22 times on the package, 24 if you include the CD itself.

It's a Maxim world and this, gentlemen, is the soundtrack. Tits and arias. So much so that these babes got their big break singing for football fans at the FA Cup Final at Buckingham Palace and the Champion's League Final. They were so popular with this crowd that their awful rendition of a Puccini aria was selected as the theme song for England's ITV television network coverage of the World Cup. And from there it's been on to ads for British Airways and appearances in front of the Queen.

So, really, what's wrong with this music? After all, hasn't opera always been about taking things over the top? Isn't hysteria and hyperreality the stuff that opera fanatics' dreams are made of? Do we ever really believe that, even in spite of the live elephants, Aida would have willingly entered the tomb to die with Radames?

Opera is all spectacle and hyperbole and therein lies the problem with this disc: it's too tame. Perhaps that's an understatement. The OperaBabes are to Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi what Kenny G is to John Coltrane. Violations abound: the girls' voices are swathed in mist-washed Celtic synthesizers, harps, tinkling pianos and are backed with choruses of clear-throated angels. Sappy lyrics are penned to Mendelssohn's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," retitled "Beyond Imagination," and drumbeats are added. You get the idea. Great opera is a balance of windy athleticism and subtle emotion, neither of which is present here. The joy of listening to opera is the immense variety of moods created within the fiction of theater. Instead, this disc flatlines that experience. There are no crashing crescendos, no foreboding dissonant strings, no hysterically happy endings and no subtle whimpers that pull the heartstrings into spasms of empathy. In fact, there's no emotion present whatsoever. Imagine opera drained of passion. There's nothing operatic about that at all. I'm no purist but this disc makes me want to become one.

The history of opera is an amazingly expansive and flexible one. Back in the early 1950s, Wieland Wagner revived his grandfather's battered Bayreuth with full-blown modernism and was hailed as one of opera's great geniuses for doing so. From there we've seen everyone from Benjamin Britten to Philip Glass stretch the form to new limits, with a generally agreed-upon amount of goodwill. A few years back, Aretha Franklin belted out an astonishingly moving rendition of "Nessun Dorma" at the Grammys. And in subtle ways, we've seen operatic techniques fuse with r&b to produce some of today's greatest female pop vocalists.

The schlock that this disc represents is no threat to the vitality of opera. In fact, it has almost nothing to do with it, which is good. You might want to complain about the general lack of decent singing at the Met (after all, the generation of singers that preceded yours is always the "legendary" one), but rest assured, by comparison to the OperaBabes, we're living in a golden age.