Jenkins looks extraordinary: she is wearing the first of four dresses of the evening, each less substantial than the last, and the combination of her bottle-blond hair, heavy makeup, and gravity-defying endowments is pure pin-up. The audience is made up of the same greying demographic you would expect at a classical concert, and there is the occasional family group and young couple (not your conventional aphrodisiac, a Katherine Jenkins gig) we all applaud Inglis and his musicians politely.Īnd then it's time for the main event: the diva from Neath herself walks on, with a straight-laced version of I Could Have Danced All Night.
It's a big task for a string section of just 10 violins and a reduced palette of woodwind and brass. Anthony Inglis, the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra - which the programme (£8 for 20 pages) tells me is one of the "finest orchestras in Europe" - has prepared a bold opener: an uncut, uncrossed-over version of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus Overture. Yet you struggle to find any serious writing about this musical interzone, where nothing is quite what it seems a place where Bryan Adams tracks are magicked into Italian arias, Rachmaninov piano concertos are transformed into operatic hyper-ballads, and Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah is overlaid by a patina of glossy production.Ī cold December Sunday finds me in Oxford, at a concert by classical crossover's diva du jour, 28-year-old Welsh mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins, in the art-deco barn of the New Theatre. Classical music lovers might despise it, but the sales figures for this most mocked of genres are no laughing matter: Sony BMG's Il Divo, Simon Cowell's poperatic creation, outsold Robbie Williams with their debut album Josh Groban, the latest American classical-easy phenomenon who is now making it big this side of the Atlantic, has shifted more than 25m albums worldwide and the classical crossover contingent of Universal Classics and Jazz accounts for a dizzying 75% of its annual business. Welcome to classical crossover, the soundtrack to the modern Christmas (and, increasingly, the modern sporting event, the modern summer pops concert, and the modern classical mega-event). T his is the time of year when it seems no shopping trip is complete without a warming soundtrack of high-production, mock-operatic or pseudo-sacred music, performed by the likes of Katherine Jenkins, Andrea Bocelli, Russell Watson, or Lesley Garrett.
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