Classical Crossover

The elitist would insist that classical music belongs to the mountain tops, while pop sits like a light morning mist somewhere down in the valley — but in the world of classical crossover, those two distinct zones coalesce somewhere in the middle . . . somewhere quite magical, as you'll hear when Katherine Jenkins takes on Leonard Cohen ("Hallelujah") and Britain's Got Talent champ Paul Potts steams into Puccini's "Nessun dorma" like he was born in the Trevi fountain.

Vanessa-Mae does Bach, in Next Steps.

Johann Sebastian Bach didn't live long enough to hear his "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" supercharged with beats and retooled from organ to violin by Vanessa-Mae, but you know what . . . we're sure he'd approve of the 1995 single version, included here alongside Maksim's rocked up version of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumble Bee" and a reinterpretation of Pachelbel's "Canon" by Libera ("Sanctus"), London's most innovative boy choir. Soaring Welsh melody and classical lute can be found in Deep Cuts.

Our Classical Crossover Essentials goes beyond gorgeous here, thanks in no small part to Izzy (Isobel Cooper), who lends traditional Welsh lullaby "Suo Gan" a coating of pure, innocent wonderment, and Sasha Lazard, who takes "Angeli" (inspired by Antonio Cesti's "intorno all'idol mio") to ecstatic highs. Sting, meanwhile, comes over all Elizabethan and teams up with Bosnian lutenist Edin Karamazov for a gruff version of John Dowland's "Flow My Tears".

Some like to ascribe the status of "art" to classical music in order to set it apart from the "light entertainment" that is pop. But these Essentials mark the glorious convergence of those two worlds — a fabulous middle ground from where neither the globally worshipped contemporary diva nor the long-dead composer is excluded. Here, pop standards are given the classical treatment, and classical masterworks are sprinkled with pop's stardust, for an extravaganza of melody that might truly be labelled "the music of the people". Among the cavalcade of crossover stars are Barbra Streisand, Charlotte Church, Josh Groban, Lesley Garrett and Il Divo.