So who would you say are the three greatest composers of all time? Bach, certainly. Mozart, of course. And no such list would be complete without Klass.

You?ve never heard of Klass? What kind of philistine are you? You must, surely, have come across some of her many wonderful contributions: Angel In My Heart, You?re All I Need To Get By and Back Down To Zero, to take just three from Klass's oeuvre. Who needs the St Matthew Passion when you can have Straight From The Heart?

Myleene Klass is a 25-year-old musician and composer who is, in the words of Bill Holland, the managing director of Universal Classics, ?one of the greatest talents I?ve ever heard?. So great is her talent that Ms Klass has just signed a £1 million, six- album ?mega deal? with Universal.

She was also a singer with Hear'say, a pop group established by Popstars, one of a spate of indistinguishable TV programmes in which youngsters are invited to sing their way to stardom. And she is also, to use the technical term, ?fit?; Ms Klass looks very fetching in a T-shirt.

She is a pop singer. And, according to friends who are familiar with her works, a pretty average one at that. She has, however, a mission: ?to eradicate the barriers between pop and classical music?. To that end, her first classical album will comprise pieces by Bach, Mozart and that other titan, Ms Klass herself.

To be fair, I have never heard what we might call her Klassical pieces. It could be that she is indeed a major talent who just happens to look like a model and who found fame in a pop group by mistake. And she did study at the Royal Academy of Music.

Or it could just be that she is a pawn in a patronising exercise in ripping off the public, an averagely talented musician who has stumbled into a million-pound deal because she will look good on album covers. But her work is as likely to have as much in common with classical music as Jeffrey Archer's has with Dostoevsky's.

Mr Holland's claim ? that she will ?eradicate the barriers? ? is the worst kind of cynicism, a typically foul piece of marketing that patronises the listener as it claims to elevate him. It pretends to be ?inclusive? (to use the jargon de nos jours), but is in reality designed simply to give easy listening pap a false veneer of sophistication. It's tried and tested, and sells: the likes of Charlotte Church, Richard Clayderman, Russell Watson and Vanessa Mae have been covering this ground for years. The string quartet, Bond, is the latest addition. But they are no more classical musicians than were the Spice Girls, and no less the creations of the marketing men than Posh, Sporty and Scary.

People buy their pap for no other reason than they bought Klass the pop star: because it gives them instant gratification.

The idea of breaking down the barriers between Bach, Mozart and other classical composers, and Oasis, Hear'say, Jennifer Lopez and other pop stars is preposterous for one simple reason: the latter are all, relative to the former, trash. They may succeed in what they set out to do; but they are mere musical McDonalds, compared with Gordon Ramsay dinners.

You can?t ?eradicate the barriers? between pop and classical: one is designed to last and requires thought and involvement from the listener while the other is designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator and is, to use the correct musicological term, crap.
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