Music of the spheres.(Music and Sound)(satellite radio services XM Radio and Sirius offer classical music)

If the 1930s, '40s and '50s were the golden days of radio, the turn of the millennium may have marked the start of the platinum age for opera-lovers. While commercial radio stations across the U.S. continue their exodus from classical-music programming, subscription-based satellite-radio services are picking up the baton. Between them, the two digital satellite-radio services, XM Radio and Sirius, deliver six channels of classical music organized by sub-genre. Each service devotes one of its classical offerings to vocal music. XM Radio has 692,000 subscribers; Sirius has 100,000.

"We do more opera per week than the top twenty classical channels in America combined," boasts Robert Aubry Davis, program director for XM's VOX channel. When XM began broadcasting, three years ago, opera received six hours a day of airtime. Now, Davis says, he delivers eight six-hour blocks of complete operas weekly and intersperses those with arias, songs, interviews and non-operatic works by well-known composers such as Verdi, Puccini and Rossini.

"Opera people are so starved for music, because even in the top twenty metropolitan markets, many of them don't get the Met [broadcasts], and very few major stations have opera of any kind." Davis plays complete operas on Tuesday and Saturday nights and delivers syndicated programming, such as the BBC World of Opera (Saturdays at noon Eastern) and George Jellinek's The Vocal Scene (Wednesday and Friday evenings). (These programs also can be found as part of regular broadcast radio programming, as well as streamed on the internet.) One of XM's exclusives is Denyce Graves's program, in which the mezzo leads listeners through the world of grand opera--including interviews with performers, conductors and composers--also on Wednesday and Friday nights.

Not to be outdone, competitor Sirius, which began broadcasting in 2002 devotes about 60 percent of its Classical Voices channel to opera, according to host Kaaren Hushagen, who spins a full opera on Sunday nights and shorter material during the week. She says that bite-size segments lend themselves better to the car environment, where satellite radio made its debut several years ago. New products for the portable-music market and home are expanding the category, allowing for full-length works that appear on Sunday Night Opera.

"From the beginning, my programming philosophy was to make the experience like going to a recital, where you'd hear, say, three related arias," says Hushagen, who has worked in national and local radio broadcasting and as an arts administrator for some thirty years. "I played things you can listen to in short groups, so that if you have to get out of your car, you don't feel cheated because the third act of Meistersinger has just begun and it's going to last for another hour and a half."

Weekly Classical Voices features exclusives such as "Backstage with Jennifer Larmore," a series of notes and interviews, produced from the road by the mezzo-soprano. Four different "Backstage" features rotate twice daily over the course of a week. Currently, there's no time-shift recording capability (in layman's terms, the ability to record a program when you're away from home, as you can with a VCR) for either XM or Sirius. "Hopefully, people will find one time when they can conveniently hear them," Hushagen says.

On "Opera Memento," soprano Vila Tosambetti spotlights an opera per month, presenting five segments on various aspects of the opera. These segments provide informative, sometimes funny background. "Things happen backstage," Hushagen says. "Curtains fall down, people don't show up, and singers get mad and cancel."