Sponsored by Classic FM, the Classical Brit Awards pit Sting against Paul McCartney in the best album category. Sting? Paul McCartney? You heard me. Both have recorded classical crossover albums in the last year; Sting has reworked John Dowland's Elizabethan lute music to vaguely impressive, if slightly pretentious effect, Sting being Sting. Starbucks, meanwhile, wrote an oratorio to mark the 550th anniversary of Magdalen College, Oxford, an institution with which he has, unless I'm very much mistaken, absolutely no connection. Here's what our classical critic Barry Millington had to vituperate about the piece's premiere:

"Paul McCartney's pretentiously titled oratorio Ecce Cor Meum has been eight years in the making, he tells us. Eight years! Any tolerably competent student composer could have knocked off a better hour's worth of music than this vacuous tosh in as many days... McCartney eventually delivered this feeble cod-classical meditation on peace and love, the flailing vapidity of whose music is matched only by the toe-curling triteness of the words ("So much wonder around us/All the love in the air")."

I have alluded to my admiration for McCartney's songwriting elsewhere. I would even mount a case for the Frog Chorus. I have not heard Ecce Cor Meum - so am reluctant to dismiss it out of hand - but it's worth noting that Mr Millington was not the only critic to abhor the piece. Let McCartney, by all means, try his hand at this kind of thing, in his own time - after all, he was the most musically adventurous Beatle. But do not expect the results to be much cop.

Classic FM are notoriously populist, but in their defence they usually go for accessible quality, albeit garishly packaged. So you have to conclude the main reason for Macca's nomination in these awards must have been to set up a headline-grabbing confrontation with the latter-day Geordie luteneer. And it's worked - at the time of writing, the story is top of the This is London homepage. Might a few people grabbed by the headline scan down the list and later, through curiosity, invest in a recording of Anna Netrebko or Leif Ove Andsnes? I doubt it. A couple may, however, invest in Macca's composition and vow never to dabble in the classics again. Is it any wonder, as some of my colleagues are suggesting, that the classical recording industry is slowly dying?

The Classical Brits will take place on 3 May at the Albert Hall, hosted by Fern Britton.