IN Jose Carreras' latest album he has unashamedly targeted that new audience for classical vocal music discovered after The Three Tenors' World Cup soccer all-time opera hits performance.
This CD, titled Passion, puts words to famous bits of music like Beethoven's Piano Sonata No 8, Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, and Borodin's Prince Igor.
If a soft-focus CD is possible then this is it. The Angel Orchestra of London, conducted in turn by Michael Reed, John Cameron and David Firman, does not go for high drama, but rather for low contrast. With Carreras' rich, tender tones it all makes for very easy listening.
However, although the ostensible purpose was to present a way of singing along to 'some of the most beautiful musical pieces of all time', this recording - like that of The Three Tenors - is far better where the pieces are a little less known, or, as with Ave Maria, where the words were already there.
Some of the works are so used and abused already that, it can be argued, this popular treatment matched with Carreras' voice vastly improves them.
Much better, after all to think of the largo movement of Dvorak's Symphony No 9 as a song called If tomorrow comes than as the background to the Hovis commercial. Or of the over-performed Albinoni's Adagio as an Italian song about lost love.
But Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, cliched though it might be, is made more so by Jeremy Sams' lyrics to the song Love is a Melody. That shiver factor of the original needs the clarinet, not the human voice - even it is one of the world's best - to work its magic.