(FORTUNE Magazine) – You probably know Wembley Arena in London for its tennis tournaments and rock concerts. In January fans bought some 60,000 tickets for ten performances there of Puccini's Turandot. Back in the U.S., for the first time, the Lyric Opera of Chicago filled every seat of the season two weeks before opening night last September. Dolores Johnson, managing director of the Houston Grand Opera, says a younger audience helped push sales for its 1991 season to a record. Opera is getting off its high horse and wading into the mainstream. Its surge in popularity is partly due to a hit recording, Carreras Domingo Pavarotti in Concert, featuring those three superstar tenors. It went on sale in September 1990 and has sold seven million tapes, CDs, records, and videocassettes to become the best-selling classical recording ever. (By comparison, Michael Jackson's Thriller has sold more than 40 million units.) The tenors' opus has spent 70 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's classical albums chart in the U.S. PolyGram used billboards, transit advertising, and TV to sell the product, a first for classical music. And as the table shows, the trio now have a second hit.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: MARIA KEEHAN FOR FORTUNE/SOURCE: (c) 1992 BPI COMMUNICATIONS/BILLBOARD CAPTION: TOP TEN CLASSICAL ALBUMS