Vienna pop ends with a fizzle

There are enough cute sailor-suited Tadzios on the album cover to push Dirk Bogarde's Aschenbach into a terminal apoplexy. But, unlike Visconti's Death in Venice, the music on The Vienna Boys' Choir Goes Pop is not Mahler.

"Put choirboys and pop music together and they'll fizz," producer Richard Oesterreicher assures us. Alas, fizzle might be the better word, hearing the lads' attempts at guttural pre-pubescent rap or their unleavened rendition of Madonna pop.

Let's not even think about why these cherubic choristers are crooning Prince ballads or why lines like "Come on girl and get down" are falling from lips more accustomed to Ave Marias and Wiegenlieds.

With arrangements that sound as if they have been hired from Romanian Eurovision semifinalists of the 1980s, this is a gruesomely fascinating document.

Talking of taste, that estimable tenor Ian Bostridge should have known better than to take on the Master himself in his Noel Coward Songbook. It was a major miscalculation. Coward was always suspicious of highbrow music. He famously praised the potency of cheaper genres in Private Lives and much later, in the mid-60s, confided to his diary, after sitting through a Yehudi Menuhin concert, that "there has never yet been composed a piece of classical music that was not too long".

His songs rarely stray past the four-minute line but they are perfection in themselves. Numbers like Twentieth Century Blues and The Party's Over Now have a nonchalant world-weariness that takes on board the sophistication of the French chanson and the bluesy soul of the torch song.

Bostridge, most recently heard as Idomeneo in Charles Mackerras' new recording of the Mozart opera, is a fine singer but, from the opening track, that beautifully modulated voice is a liability. I Travel Alone is too artified, gracious and overcultivated, where Coward's original 1936 recording is a masterpiece.

When Bostridge is not trying to make artsongs of Coward's brittle ballads, he is hearty and heavy-handed.

This musical gentrification makes a piquant coupling with what the Vienna Boys Choir is doing with Metallica and Robbie Williams - just as inappropriate but not, ultimately, so amusing. You're better to search out Coward's originals.

* The Vienna Boys Choir Goes Pop (EMI Classics 57367); Ian Bostridge, The Noel Coward Songbook (EMI Classics 57374)