Review:
Symphonicities – Sting
Universal Music Classical/Deutsch Grammophon
A while ago, when Sting was the peak of his creative prowess and the rumors of his tantric feats of derring-do in the bedroom were running rampant, the former Policeman was making very jazzy sounds with Brandford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland and Omar Hakim (among others) while decrying he was doing any such thing. Would that he had continued exploring the intricacies of jazz time signatures and real musicians (as opposed to programmable synthesizers) that made Dream of the Blue Turtles and Nothing Like The Sun so interesting.
Instead, Sting's road has lead through the aforementioned synthesizer rock experiments, an exploration of the lute, a non-traditional Christmas album, and a reunion tour with The Police that sold well as nostalgia but showed some of the rust of time. And now Sting returns with Symphonicities, a twelve-track exploration of his music realized by band with orchestra on Universal's classical label.
The re-imagining kicks off with "Next To You", the first song from The Police's 1978 debut album, Outlandos d'Amour. The placement is hardly coincidental – if one is going to do some reinterpretation, why not start at the beginning? But opening with Sting's first cut, made when he was 1/3 of a scrappy punk outfit, introduces an uncomfortable question that pervades the entire exercise once the novelty of the first thirty seconds wears off: just how old has Sting gotten?
This isn't the first time Sting's material has been backed by an orchestra. In 1987, Gil Evans and his jazz orchestra cut two tracks with Sting for Nothing Like The Sun, and Sting joined them live at the Perugia Jazz Festival that same year. But there's a vitality there that's missing here, an irony given the liner notes by Anthony DeCurtis that speak in glowing terms of how Symphonicities transcends the tendency of classical/pop meldings to be “uninteresting” or “uninspired.” In their way, the liner notes are more pretentious than the product they serve.
“Next To You” is, sadly, the most adventurous attempt on the album, vibrant guitar replaced by equally vibrant (if less jangly) strings. But if the song builds any momentum or listener interest, it's almost immediately tamped down by “Englishman In New York”, a bland and not-so-very different take on the 1987 song that misses Branford Marsalis' saxophone, but retains (of all things) the drum breakdown after the song's bridge, which feels like it was edited in here as an afterthought.
The rest of the disc descends into a hodgepodge of songs that weren't so far from classical in the first place (“When We Dance”, “You Will Be My Ain True Love”, the b-side “The Pirate's Bride”) or songs that aren't particularly more interesting in their newly arranged form (“Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”, “She's Too Good for Me”, “I Burn For You” and especially a listless take on “Roxanne”.)
If anything stands out, “I Hung My Head” benefits from a more natural vocal by Sting than it received on Mercury Falling and “We Work The Black Seam” receives a horn-heavy treatment that lends it a sorrowful nobility befitting a lyric about poisoned coal miners. If you have to download one track for a listen, this last may be worth a buck. Otherwise, the album is a quickly forgettable artifact that may attract the curious and sell concert tickets this summer, but adds little to Sting's overall musical legacy.
