On track: Santa’s crossover lollipops

Kiri Te Kanawa’s Gala Concert DVD has energy and life.

How often we seem to be presented with so-called culture that's simply a vehicle for PR spin.

EMI's Number One Classical Album 2004 is a case in point; 32 lollipops with the Gheorghius and Pavarottis alongside the likes of Russell Watson and Hayley Westenra with that classic Kiwi Lied, Pokarekare ana.

Classical it is not, but there is no stopping these silly marketing packages and what was a trickle during the year becomes a deluge as Christmas approaches.

Sir James Galway, the superannuated leprechaun, takes flute and tin whistle to everything from Wagner to Lord of the Rings on his new album, Wings of Song, although more than wings are needed to get this dodo off the ground. Ground level zero is Schubert's Ave Maria, with cello obligato - the musical equivalent of wading in treacle.

Andre Rieu peps up the tempo in The Flying Dutchman, a quaint collection of marches, waltzes and a few quieter pieces. Alas, when Rieu's violin takes over, he sounds like a cafe performer and Susan Eren's charmless Somewhere over the Rainbow would make the Cowardly Lion take offence.

It's touching that the faux-classical brigade long for validation. Tenor Andrea Bocelli has returned from some legit operatic ventures to home territory with his new album Andre.

"In opera my responsibility is to the tradition," Bocelli has claimed, "in pop my responsibility is to the audience. I want to offer inspired and unique songs, not something written to a formula."

Italian pop has seen better days and has been more enticingly sung. If the Italian lyrics are as inane as those of the one English song that sets off "Gather me in your arms ... to fly again in flower's dreams", then this is cause for worry.

We have come to accept the tacky, cynical repackaging of albums with bonus tracks, serving no purpose other than recharging stale product. Bic Runga, Goldenhorse and Hayley Westenra; they've all done it.

Russian "popera" divette, Yulia, has joined them. The Christchurch singer's Into the West has returned for Christmas with additional Yuletide dirges. There are no sleigh bells within cooee, and they certainly might have brightened up a lugubrious Silent Night sung in Russian.

The torpor that she and arranger Carl Doy manage to lay on Handel's Ombra mai fu shouldn't be wished on the vilest supermarket muzak.

Back in 1997, the title of Sarah Brightman's Time To Say Goodbye album looked promising. Alas, seven years later, she is still here, strutting her stuff at Las Vegas in a soporific DVD of her Harem show.

Looking like an automaton doll, eternally trapped in the shakiest of upper registers, she has the harem mostly to herself, apart from the occasional parade of undistinguished chorus girls. A lusty sheik or two, not to mention the odd upbeat number, would not have gone amiss.

Kiri Te Kanawa may have flirted with popera but, apart from the obligatory nod to Lord of the Rings, most of her Gala Concert DVD is pretty kosher. While I wouldn't go so far as the press release which rhapsodises about "high notes floating like weightless diamonds", this is a business-like record of what was an enjoyable night in the theatre for a good cause.

The DVD cruelly exposes some rough playing from the Auckland Philharmonia, a few muffed entries and less-than-flattering close-ups of singers really working for their top notes. But, alongside Brightman's Stepford Soprano, there's energy and life, not to mention marvellous music which has survived all the indignities that the ad agency world has inflicted upon it.