You know the shot. Thousands of people walk across a Utah salt flat, the camera pulls up, and they turn into a face that winks. Under it, two women’s voices climb in thirds over a rocking 6/8. That advert is from 1989, and the question people have typed into search boxes ever since is the same: what is that music?
Short version: the classical music used in British Airways adverts is one piece, the Flower Duet (“Viens, Mallika… Dôme épais”) from Léo Delibes’s opera Lakmé, first performed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 14 April 1883. BA has used it since 1984, five years before the winking face, and every “new” BA theme since has been a fresh arrangement of the same forty seconds. The two campaigns that skipped it did not use classical music at all. Below: every version, which is best, and where to hear the real duet.
What the Flower Duet actually is
Lakmé is a French opera set in British-ruled India. In Act I, Lakmé, the daughter of a Brahmin priest, and her servant Mallika go down to the river to gather flowers and sing about jasmine, roses and the white lotus on the water. That is the whole dramatic content. Nobody falls in love, nobody dies, nothing is decided. It is a soprano and a mezzo-soprano moving in parallel thirds over a gentle 6/8 in B major, and the full duet runs about six minutes.
BA only ever uses the opening refrain, the “Sous le dôme épais” tune, under a minute long. That choice is smarter than it looks. The refrain is the stretch where the harmony barely moves: the voices double each other a third apart, the orchestra rocks underneath, the melody floats. From inside the string section this passage is almost nothing to play, a rocking figure that must stay perfectly even so the singers can sit on it. Motion without urgency is precisely what an airline wants to sell. Compare the Verdi chorus that Wikipedia says BA used in earlier 1980s spots (more below): “Va, pensiero” is a crowd longing for home. The Flower Duet is two people with nowhere they need to be.
And the duet was not discovered by an advertising agency. The composer and arranger Howard Blake recorded it with his own orchestra for Tony Scott’s 1983 vampire film The Hunger, and it was Scott who brought it to BA. Our guide to classical music in movies covers how a film can define a piece; this is the rare case where the advert then out-defined the film.
Every version BA has put on air
1984: the Howard Blake arrangement, “Wider Seats”
This is the version almost every explainer misses, including Classic FM’s, which dates BA’s Flower Duet to 1989. Howard Blake’s own catalogue (op. 333) records the commission from Saatchi & Saatchi and the session: recorded at CTS Studios on 31 March 1984, sopranos Elaine Barry and Judith Pearce, orchestra conducted by Blake. The commercial was called “Wider Seats”. According to its editor Simon Laurie, quoted on Blake’s site, a wider seat is lowered into a roofless plane, a small bird gets trapped when the roof goes back on, and the roof lifts again to free it, because BA was “the airline that cares about everyone that flies”.
Blake says innumerable re-arrangements followed over more than twenty years; his catalogue lists two from 1985 alone, including a “Superlakme” for full orchestra with four horns, three trombones and tuba. So the BA sound was a house style before the famous advert existed, and the 1984 version, real singers with a real orchestra, is the closest any BA arrangement ever came to the opera.
1989: “Face”, the one everybody means
Saatchi & Saatchi again, written by Graham Fink and Jeremy Clarke, directed by Hugh Hudson and shot in Utah with thousands of extras. Swimmers form lips, a crowd forms an eye, the voiceover says “Every year, the world’s favourite airline brings 24 million people together”, the face winks and dissolves into a globe. Channel 4’s 100 Greatest TV Ads poll in 2000 placed it at 62; ITV’s Best Ads Ever in 2005 placed it at 15. Watch it here.
The music is not the opera. It is a track called “Aria”, credited to Yanni and Malcolm McLaren, with the vocal sung by Monalisa Young, who later re-recorded it for Yanni’s album Dare to Dream. It is an adaptation: the Delibes melody carried by a single singer over an electronic backing. My take as a listener is that it is brilliant advertising and thin music. What makes the original glow is the friction between two different voice types a third apart, and a solo line over keyboards cannot have that. But it did what no arrangement before it had done: it turned a French opera number into a corporate signature a whole country could hum.
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Early 1990s: McLaren’s “Aria on Air”
Here the credits get confusing. “Aria on Air” is a separate McLaren track. Wikipedia’s entry on his 1990 Virgin album Round the Outside! Round the Outside! explains that the opera-singing sections of the album’s “Operaa House!” were repurposed into “Aria on Air”, which BA used in commercials in the early 1990s. The engineer George Shilling, who worked on McLaren’s advertising music, describes it as operatic vocals over a rhythmic backing. So “Aria” (1989, Yanni and McLaren) and “Aria on Air” (McLaren) are two different records on the same tune, and both get called “the British Airways theme”. The McLaren one is here, opera voices over a beat, and I prefer it to the Yanni version precisely because it does not pretend to be tasteful.
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1990s: the world-music remix you cannot stream
The most detailed first-hand account of any BA arrangement is TV composer David Lowe’s, in Sound On Sound. His partner Julian Ronnie learned from Saatchi & Saatchi that the agency had already chosen the Flower Duet for a new BA commercial but wanted a world-music version of the same melody. Their demo sampled the opera from a CD and added children’s voices from David Fanshawe’s Spirit of African Sanctus, a sampled tabla part and a synth pizzicato bass. Lowe calls it his big break. I have found no commercial release, so it survives only in old ad reels.
1997: the Dave Stewart remix (single source)
The aviation blog London Air Travel credits a 1997 remix to Dave Stewart of Eurythmics for the campaign “The world is closer than you think”, and says the tune was reworked again for “The way to fly” in 2004. I could not find a second source for either credit, so treat both as reported, not confirmed. The pattern is not in doubt: every few years BA commissions someone new to redo the same forty seconds.
2011 and 2019: the two campaigns that were not classical
Two famous BA adverts skipped Delibes. The 2011 “To Fly. To Serve.” launch used a new piano-led score by the contemporary composer Helen Jane Long, which Classic FM covered at the time; it is film-style piano writing, not a classical piece. The 2019 centenary spot “Made by Britain” ran to Gabrielle Aplin’s song “Salvation”. If you searched for the classical music in either, there is none.
2019: the centenary version by a BA engineer
The cleverest arrangement in the lineage is the least heard. For BA’s hundredth year, Lyndon Ooi, a quality engineer at the airline who leads the British Airways Orchestra (about 30 staff plus outside players), wrote a version with 100 bars for 100 years, the bar numbers running from 1919, when BA’s earliest ancestor, Air Transport and Travel, was formed. Ten variations mark ten milestones, from Imperial Airways to Concorde’s farewell to Heathrow Terminal 5. And he transposed the theme from Delibes’s B major to G major so that the tune’s first two notes are B and A. That is a musician’s joke and a good one. Business Traveller filmed the orchestra playing it, here.
2021: “You Make Us Fly”
When flying restarted after the pandemic, BA’s press release for its 6 May 2021 campaign said the advert was set to the Flower Duet, described the piece as having over 40 years of history in BA advertising, and noted it is still the boarding music. The 60-second film, by WPP’s Team Horizon (Ogilvy, Wavemaker and Hogarth), shows real staff returning to work, beginning with 777 captain Helen Wetton. It uses a sung performance of the duet rather than a synth adaptation, which is the right call: the operatic version sounds like relief, and the Yanni version would have sounded like a jingle.
Always: the boarding music
If you have flown BA you have heard the duet while looking for your seat; the boarding loop is on YouTube here. It is instrumental, and it is the version most people carry in their heads, which is part of why the 2021 advert lands: the sung version arrives like the words to a tune you only knew as a hum.
The footnote: Verdi
Wikipedia’s page on the Face advert notes that “Va, pensiero”, the chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Verdi’s Nabucco, featured in earlier 1980s BA adverts. I found no second source or surviving spot confirming which ones, so I am recording the claim, not endorsing it.
The standout
As an advert, “Face” wins and it is not close: it made the tune public property. As music, the 1984 Blake session wins, because it is the only BA version made by two trained sopranos and an orchestra playing the piece roughly as Delibes wrote it. The 2019 Ooi version is the one I would send to a musician friend, for the B-A transposition alone. If you only listen to one thing, listen to the opera.
Where to hear the real thing
Every BA version trims the duet to its refrain. The full number has a middle section where the two women hesitate, and then the refrain returns; that return is the best moment in the piece and no advert has ever included it. Four recordings, with a verdict.
Natalie Dessay, Delphine Haidan / Michel Plasson / Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse / 1998 / EMI
The complete Lakmé to own, recorded in Toulouse and released by EMI in 1998. Dessay’s soprano is light and exact, Haidan’s mezzo darker than most Mallikas, and the gap between them is the point: two colours a third apart, not one voice doubled. Plasson keeps the 6/8 moving, closer to a barcarolle than a lullaby. Its limit is that Dessay’s voice is small, so after the Netrebko video below it can sound polite for a minute. Give it two. For anyone who wants the duet in context, with the whole opera attached.
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Sabine Devieilhe, Marianne Crebassa / François-Xavier Roth / Les Siècles / 2017 / Erato
From Devieilhe’s album Mirages, released in November 2017, and the track I would play to a first-time listener. Les Siècles play period instruments, so the accompaniment is drier and lighter than on a modern-orchestra recording and the voices sit on top of it rather than inside a cushion. Devieilhe and Crebassa take the refrain quickly and without swooning, which is how it reads in the score. The trade-off: this is a recital track, so you get the duet and nothing around it. For anyone who has only heard the advert and wants to know what it sounded like in 1883.
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Joan Sutherland, Jane Berbié / Richard Bonynge / Orchestre National de l’Opéra de Monte-Carlo / 1967 / Decca
Recorded in October 1967, the grand-manner alternative. Sutherland’s voice is simply bigger than this music, and Bonynge lets the refrain spread, so the duet becomes a slow processional rather than a river song. If the Dessay set is too small-scale for you, this is the answer; if you want the words intelligible, it is not, because diction was never Sutherland’s point. For listeners who love a huge voice floating.
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Anna Netrebko, Elīna Garanča / Marco Armiliato / SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg / 2007 / Deutsche Grammophon (live)
From The Opera Gala: Live from Baden-Baden, recorded at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden in 2007 and released by DG that October, and the performance most people have seen on video. Garanča’s mezzo is the star; she has the darker line and Netrebko sits a third above like a descant. It is slow, and they stretch the refrain’s last phrase further than Delibes’s tempo invites. For anyone who wants the glamour version, or who likes a mezzo more than a soprano.
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Verdict. Buy the Dessay/Plasson set if you want one Lakmé. Play the Devieilhe/Crebassa track to anyone who asks “what’s the BA music?” Keep Sutherland for the days you want size, and Netrebko/Garanča for the video. If choosing between opera sets is new to you, our piece on the best recording of La Bohème explains how we weigh cast against conductor against sound.
Why one tune survived forty years of rebranding
Agencies and slogans changed; the tune stayed, and I think the reason is structural rather than sentimental. A melody doubled in thirds over a harmony that hardly moves survives anything you do to it: a drum machine, a tabla loop, a period band, a staff orchestra transposing it into G. Most adverts pick music to match a mood. BA picked music with no mood and spent four decades pouring moods into it, which is why the next remake will be this duet again. For more on how a single cue gets welded to a screen image, see our rundown of classical music in modern movies.
Sources and what I could not confirm
The 1984 session details are from Howard Blake’s catalogue at Highbridge Music; the “Face” facts and poll rankings from Wikipedia; the “Aria on Air” origin from Wikipedia and George Shilling’s site; the David Lowe account from Sound On Sound; the 2019 centenary details from Business Traveller and Airline Ratings; the 2021 campaign facts from the BA Media Centre. Recording dates are from MusicBrainz, Presto Music, Warner Classics and Deutsche Grammophon. Unconfirmed: the 1997 and 2004 remix credits (London Air Travel only) and the pre-1984 use of “Va, pensiero” (Wikipedia only). I could not verify which singers perform the duet in the 2021 advert, so I have not named any.