Adya

It's a bit hard to tell from the packaging what Adya Classic is, but that hasn't stopped it and Adya Classic 2 from becoming chart-topping hits in parts of northwestern Europe. Both albums contain music in the mode of the old Hooked on Classics albums, although the famous classical melodies involved are free-standing rather than presented in medleys. Each piece bears two names: the title of the classical work from which it is drawn plus a vaguely Greek-sounding title apparently denoting the rhythm track added by producer and arranger Phil Sterman. There is a full orchestra on hand; these are not remixes but fresh performances. Do they work? The trouble with releases of this kind is that they tend not to be successful either as classical music or as electronic dance music; the pieces don't develop in the way that is the chief attraction of classical music as such, and the electronics in this case don't seem to have advanced much beyond the 1980s heyday of such recordings. This said, one can understand why the Adya Classic discs have been successful. They're varied in structure and scope, with several different ways of working up to or peeling off from the classical model, and each piece has its own texture -- its own interpretation, so to speak of the classical melody involved. They could certainly be danced to (and probably are), but they do not consist of 20-minute segments of the same beat like the Hooked on Classics albums did. Sample the "La primavera" melody from Vivaldi's Four Seasons (track 8) for an idea of what you're getting into here, and for a clue as to the persistence of the classics in the European popular-musical mind.