Can 'sexy' be 'serious' too?

Classical music, it seems, is becoming a highbrow "Baywatch." The Web site www.beautyinmusic.com features revealing photographs of comely female musicians suggestively holding violins and cellos. The site, run by a Colorado singer-songwriter, calls itself "the ultimate guide to the hottest women in classical music." And in Britain, the new 24-hour television station Classic FM has launched a kind of classical MTV with three-minute videos devoted to Vanessa-Mae, Charlotte Church and Nigel Kennedy's hair. It's not just the golden-locked Leila Josefowicz, who made a splash in the 1990s, anymore.

Soloists are increasingly young Asian women (Chee-Yun) in clingy evening gowns, or Scandinavian maidens (Playboy cover girl Linda Brava) with flowing blond hair; the young men lean toward Tom Cruise-style All-Americans (the blue-jeaned Joshua Bell) or Byronic heartthrobs (hair-tossing Andre Rieu). Even demure players such as Hilary Hahn are being photographed like movie stars. Many players under 35 are being sold as "babes" of one kind or the other.

"For God's sake, let's put some uncompromising physical ugliness back into classical music," critic Victor Lewis-Smith writes in a recent London Evening Standard, "so we all start listening again instead of looking, before it's too late."

There have always been handsome classical performers who traded on their physical charisma, from pianists Dinu Lipatti and William Kapell (both of whom died young, their features never sullied by age) to the dashing Leonard Bernstein to opera divas such as Rosa Ponselle. But it's gone a whole other step from the days when English cellist Jacqueline DuPre was considered a sex symbol.

Is it healthy for classical music to step into the ring with popular culture, to fight for magazine spreads and TV space, to move out of the fine-arts ghetto? Or will packaged sexuality kill serious music, making it harder for a brilliant but homely player to get a hearing?

"It feels increasingly desperate," says David Sefton, who books classical musicians for UCLA Performing Arts. "This is an attempt to market and commodify classical music to make it more like pop, to plug the gap for rapidly shrinking record sales." At the very least, he says, it's annoying. "But when someone's just a great musician and not a looker, and they don't get a record contract ... that's when it's reprehensible."