Tenor Nathan Granner and classical guitarist Beau Bledsoe have a message for those who still think classical music is staid.

It's summed up in the title of the program they perform this week at the University of Kansas-Edwards Campus and then take on a tour of seven other cities: "Mozart Was a Punk: How to Make Classical Music Not Suck."

Their message is not about Mozart's scrawny physique or his inability to defend himself on the playground. Instead it's the local duo's way of saying that music of previous eras can "rock" as much as the most kickin' music of the present.

"Mozart was the world's first well-known punker, the first rock 'n' roll punk band," said Granner, a local favorite who is also a Sony recording artist and has appeared in PBS specials and with the local group Tango Lorca.

"I would liken Mozart to the Clash. He just wanted to write his music and play it. He didn't care about norms. His first concert was canceled because people didn't like what he was doing."

Granner is not being facetious. He is a sophisticated singer of opera, Broadway, jazz, flamenco and pop who has given music a lot of thought. He knows his stuff, too, with hundreds of performances on the opera and musical-theater stage, in clubs, restaurants and coffeehouses and as a member of the American Tenors vocal trio.

More than a decade ago Granner had a mini-epiphany listening to the raucous finale of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.

"And I'm like rocking out, totally rocking out," he said. "And I thought, 'This is rock 'n' roll. What's the difference between now and then?' "

If Mozart is a punker, Granner said, then "What about Schubert? There's your first goth. Beethoven is Queen, with the huge epic show." And on it goes.

Granner and Bledsoe have applied their crossover philosophy to their latest CD together, "Departure," which forms the basis of their tour performances from now through May. The disc contains music ranging from Villa-Lobos and John Dowland to "The Ash Grove" and "Mi Tierra." There's even a clever flamenco version of "E lucevan le stelle," the big tenor aria from "Tosca."

Critics have praised the disc as an example of what crossover can achieve when it's approached with a light touch. The Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer compared it to less wholesome crossover attempts. "There is crossover and there is real musical range. There is sentimentality and there is imagination. There is Andrea Bocelli and there is Nathan Granner."

After performing the show in Kansas City, the duo travels around Kansas to Wichita, Garden City and Cottonwood Falls, and to Asheville, N.C., Huntsville, Ala., Johnson City, Tenn., and (yes) Perm, Russia.

So far audiences have vindicated the duo's theory that if you just play, they will listen. When they performed the program locally at the Brick, and at a rock club in Orlando, Fla., Granner said he feared that they were going to have "the whole Blues Brothers experience, with people booing and throwing things."

Instead, the young audiences sat and listened raptly. They were stunned. For Granner and Bledsoe, it was a full-circle arrival with historical precedents.

"Caccini was a huge rock star," Granner said. "Mozart played in bars. He did 'The Magic Flute' in a freakin' bar."