Do not despair, opera fans. Although the present crop seem to be aging a bit and on the verge of retirement, there are plenty of good ones coming up. Among tenors, for example, are Juan Diego Flores (Peruvian, I believe) who is a spectacular lyric tenor, and Jerry Hadley, an American tenor who is just about as good as they come. Both young.

Viggo, I guess I did miss the humor. I didn't see the show you're referring to, but on some PBS special, I did see Pavarotti's duet with Sting. Panis Angelicus a la Cesar Franck. I knew Pavarotti could bring it off because I've heard him do it many times, but what surprised me was that Sting brought it off too. Oddly enough, the contrast between the two voices--Pavarotti's full operatic tenor and Sting's relatively thin, flat voice (i.e., on pitch, but no vibrato)--really sounded good together. Some of the other combinations do strike me as a bit weird.

M.Ted is right. It's marketing rather than art. A number of classical singers have done this sort of thing within recent years. Probabably one of the first was the Perhaps Love duet between Placido Domingo and John Denver. Sometimes not a bad thing. Because of that recording, lots of people who had never heard of Domingo got a chance to hear him and some even liked him and bought some of his records. Reciprocally, a lot of classical music only types maybe decided that John Denver wasn't all that bad. Marketing.

Don Firth