57th & 9th: World Tour

Sting at the Porsche Arena - There's strength in calm...

Pop musician Sting takes a musical journey through the decades at Stuttgart's Porsche Arena. He and his outstanding band present excellent song material in a completely unpretentious manner.

On the large stage are a few spotlights, two guitar amplifiers, three pairs of monitor speakers, four microphone stands, and the drum kit on a flat platform. There are no video walls and no notable light show. Unlike many other bandleaders, Sting never leaves the stage during the entire concert and doesn't ask for a freshly tuned instrument for each new song. Quite the opposite: He plays the entire concert on his favourite, worn-out bass.

At first glance, one might call this austere, given a performance of this magnitude—the Porsche Arena is sold out with 6,500 spectators on Wednesday evening. But that's not how it feels at all. Beautifully intimate and functionally pared down: that's much more the impression of this setting, almost reminiscent of a rehearsal room atmosphere, which provides a pleasant counterpoint to the gimmickry of today's pop music entertainment business. The British musician clearly wants to return to his roots on his current tour, and he succeeds extraordinarily well.

Sting has a drummer, a guitarist, and his old collaborator Dominic Miller on lead guitar, nothing more. This makes for a classic rock foursome, and one might think that this would inevitably come at the expense of the highly complex arrangements of his songs. But that's far from the case. Branford Marsalis' soprano saxophone, for example, which shapes the melody of "Englishman In New York," seems essentially irreplaceable in this song. But the way Sting and his small band compensate for his absence is impressive. From the previous song, the quartet grooves into a sophisticated and original interpretation of the song. Dominic Miller demonstrates, for the first time, how to control an ensemble sound with effects pedals, and the live interpretation is in no way inferior to the original studio recording.

The song before that is the Police hit "Spirits In The Material World," and the number before that is called "Synchronicity II," also well-known and also by his former band. It opens the evening, and with this triad as an opening, Sting immediately sets the tone for the evening. The tour's motto is the title of his current album, "57th & 9th," which Englishman, currently living in New York, named after the street corner in his adopted hometown where the recording studio is located. And, of course, Sting also fulfils his duty by performing a few pieces from it. However, they are embedded in the concert as if they had been part of his repertoire for many years; they are not at all noticeable as new additions to this seamless evening. They are framed, however, by a best-of program featuring the best of both Sting worlds.

(c) Stuttgarter-Nachrichten by Jan Ulrich Welke