When Sasha Lazard and Shawna Stone first met they realized they shared cherished backgrounds in grand opera. Still, each of the young sopranos found that lofty tradition, for all its splendors, unfulfilling personally; each yearned for broader creative outlets for her talents. Sasha -- a New Yorker who grew up also partly in Paris, attending and loving the opera with her French father and American mother -- had gone on to study literature and voice at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Shawna -- a native of Fremont, CA drawn to opera practically from birth who as a ten-year-old taught piano to neighborhood kids as her sole way of financing her voice lessons -- eventually graduated from USC on a full vocal scholarship.

In different ways, both women had ignored the strict rules and preconceptions of the conventional opera world and pursued the tricky realm of classical crossover. At conservatory, Sasha had befriended instrumentalists, joined a rock band, and worked with a Los Angeles music producer; over time, she began to explore, and excel at, virtually uncharted musical notions of the trained voice interacting with stylistic elements of electronic dance music. Working with the producer Frank Fitzpatrick, she made a rare top-drawer example of that perhaps unlikely fusion music, releasing 'The Myth of Red' on Higher Octave Records in 2002. Having sung after conservatory with small opera companies, Sasha had found that her aspirations didn't fit into that utterly contained universe.

Shawna, on the other hand, wholly had felt happy to pursue vigorously -- and realize -- many of her life-long dreams of being an opera singer at large on the stages of international opera houses. She had never sung with a microphone. She didn't always find the daily culture of traditional opera, however, as thrilling as the singing. She continued to come home and listen to A Tribe Called Quest, even if her colleagues in the opera world had never heard of the hip-hop pioneers. And so when, for example, the editors of FHM, the best-selling London publication, asked her to pose for them, Shawna, defying the traditional opera world's traditional obliviousness to mainstream young men and the lifestyle magazines they read and look at, drew confidence in her hard-won and legitimate abilities and agreed readily to the shoot.

Despite divergent backgrounds and different methods of rebellion against the classical singing they both adored, that Sasha and Shawna met and ended up releasing 'Siren', their debut for Manhattan Records, makes a sort of sense as gorgeous as the haunting and affecting recording itself. Produced by the veteran English-born, Los Angeles-based Grammy-winning producer Peter Asher, well-known for his classic work with Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor as well as many other pop artists, and with two tracks overseen by 'The Myth of Red' producer Frank Fitzpatrick, the twelve-song collection is the work of two singers frustrated by musical limits and generously attentive to their current and potential audiences.

"There has long been a whole range of music that I've wanted to explore," says Sasha, whose previous work -- which includes contributions to the soundtracks for 'Princess Mononoke' and 'Holy Smoke' -- took her to the clubs of New York, Los Angeles, and Ibiza, and, with 'The Myth of Red', positions on the Billboard's Hot Dance and Classical Crossover charts, as well as private concert work for Bulgari, Armani, and Maserati.

"Music is about giving," says Shawna, a Coldplay and Jimi Hendrix fan who has sung at Lincoln Center and throughout Europe, notably Italy, and has sung Cleopatra in Handel's 'Julius Caesar' and Adele in Strauss' 'Die Fledermaus'. "What you care about is what anybody feels when he or she listens."

Between their initial meeting, at New York's SoHo House, and the release of 'Siren', however, events tested Sasha and Shawna's commitments to their core creative values. Originally, as members of a proposed project masterminded by another record company, they were to have been part of a pop-classical vocal group. But work on that project, in the view of Sasha and Shawna, devolved into an over-emphasis on visual image and worn-out arias. Weary of this, the two women -- both of whom had thought, when they met, that each reminded her of the other -- scheduled some time with Bruce Lundvall, President of EMI Music, Jazz & Classics, U.S.

It was a fortuitous meeting. "Our earlier project," Shawna says, "got to be not about having amazing voices; it became not artistically driven. So we had begun to wonder what we were going to do. You can imagine: Sasha and I are two very strong girls with very strong opinions. Things began to seem unnatural."

"I've learned from having been in the crossover world," says Sasha, "that the big, operatic voice is off-putting to people who are not in the opera world. So, if you're a soprano singing over beats with a big opera voice, it grates on people; they just don't like it. What I had come up with was a kind of pure-tone approach; it was not an opera sound, and it was not a pop sound. It was somewhere in between. I found that it really melded into the music, as opposed to just being this big opera sound on top of things."

As a musical matter, Shawna was a more content creature of the opera world; for as long as she could remember, the trained voice electrified her. It was for her what the guitar was for Eddie Van Halen. Even so, other creative possibilities called her name. "I sang fully operatic on the canon pieces we chose for 'Siren'," she says, "however I stripped away the opera volume on others. While certain characteristic and nuances link the two styles, they are quite disparate. But that very expanse, that very flexibility, is what I wanted to explore and achieve. Both styles -- one for the opera pieces and one for songs that ask for a softer, more intimate technique -- are equally challenging in their very different ways."

"Anyway," Sasha says, "when we played our music for Bruce, he loved both our stuff."

"We played our music," Shawna says, "and fifteen minutes later Bruce said, 'This is incredible, let's do it.' And he hit his hand on the desk. We had a record deal. We asked him 'Well, what do you want the record to be?' And he said, 'We'll figure it out.'"

"He said," Sasha says, "go off and make the album you want to make. That's exactly what we did."

According to Peter Asher, the goal of 'Siren' is to offer the beauty and power of trained voices in a more accessible environment, one that that fits more with what people are used to hearing, as Asher puts it, "come out of that car radio." For his part, he says he tried to make the blend of the two singers' voices compelling without becoming untowardly technical in approach. "We began running the songs with a piano," Asher says, "in the most general way: Key, tempo, nature of the arrangement, where the dynamics of the songs were going. We listened until it seemed right. And then, of course, we encouraged the best performances. We did get the feeling that we were venturing into new territory, trying to find a more organic approach to this. We didn't construct tracks out of our brains and then stick vocals on top of the tracks; we constructed the tracks given how Sasha and Shawna sang the songs."

And the songs, well, they're a wonderfully various, effortless-seeming postmodern lot: Radiohead's "Fade Out," John Denver's "Per Te/For You" (sung partially in Italian), James Taylor's "Close Your Eyes," Kansas' "Dust in the Wind," Secret Garden's "Sleep Song." There are pieces from the traditional operatic canon, such as Donizetti's "Una Furtiva Lagrima" (from L'Elisir d'Amore), an adaptation of Bach's Air on the G String here entitled "Time" -- as well as "Stabat Mater [XX]," produced by Fitzpatrick, a revisitation of the 18th century Italian composer Pergolesi, which on 'Siren' is a revisitation of a track from 'The Myth of Red'. Another Fitzpatrick production is a rendering of Sting's "Fields of Gold," a track which was the beginning of how Sasha moved her own pure tone studio approach to a more traditionally organic pop treatment and how Shawna reconfigured her stage-trained soprano into something more conditioned by lyrics -- and how these two amazing singers worked all of that into their own singular 'Siren' blends.

"These songs," Sasha says, "needed to be about the words, not the voice, even though we were very concerned about the sound. A big, big difference from opera is that there you're communicating a melody more than the words. But once you've trained in opera -- and learned to loosen up -- then you'll try anything. It's extraordinary training. The issue is just letting go, relaxing, being free."

"I realized," Shawna says, "that this is a different skill. It's not not using the athleticism you've built up; it's just about channeling it differently. Intimacy requires a lot of strength, too. I think of it as like film acting is to stage acting -- when you're on film, it's noticeable if you blink. When you're on stage, it has to be so big for the audience to see and feel it."

"There's nothing embarrassing about these very unexpected songs," Sasha says. "No, 'Ah, we had to do this song because that's what classical crossover artists do.' We were very, very choosy; the songs that flew were the best of the best. And what we could do seemed limitless. It's just great music, and these are beautiful songs."

In the end, this is the crux of the Sasha & Shawna story -- more so than the fact that, as Shawna laughs, the English tabloid The Sun puzzled over her cleavage quotient the same week that 'House & Garden' ran a spread of Sasha's apartment: Great music and beautiful songs. These are never things to under-rate, and on 'Siren' they never are.