Brand New Day: 1999/01

Sting at Zurich's Hallenstadion on Tuesday...

Yoga, show - well done, in any case - artfully arranged music. Sting once again thrilled the audience at Zurich's Hallenstadion - Sting brought stadium rock, expertly executed, to Zurich's Hallenstadion on Tuesday. The performance featured his current album, "Brand New Day," and hits from his earlier days.

It's a bit like a brand-new day is dawning, and familiar music is playing from the stereo. When Sting presents his current album, "Brand New Day," on stage, it too sounds beautiful and familiar. Nothing jars. Not even the nine-eighth and seven-four time signatures, which are counted by music-theoretically trained ears, because Sting makes even complicated rhythms sound quite catchy, so much so that you wonder why they have to be complicated at all. But a Sting concert doesn't ask, and you shouldn't ask back. A Sting concert offers a full range of artfully arranged music, full-throated vocals, and hits from both distant and more recent times. You should give of yourself. Enthusiasm, for example.

"Grüezi," says Gordon Matthew Sumner, whom everyone here calls Sting. A black, sleeveless vest stretches over his 48-year-old body and suits him well. Accompanied by accomplished musicians and a powerful singer, he is surrounded by. His daily touring routine, as he reveals on his website, consists of a 30-minute soundcheck, two hours of yoga, interviews, two hours on stage, one drink, and then sleep. An all-in-all delightful fellow is on stage here, and one is aware of his commitment to the environment and against war. The concert is conducted with fine craftsmanship, and his deliberate dramaturgy ensures that it still tastes good even after an hour and a half. Like the album, the concert opens with 'A Thousand Years,' a feel-good song of the melancholic variety typical of Sting's solo work. A return to his early work immediately follows with the crisp 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free' from Sting's first solo album, 'The Dream Of The Blue Turtles' from 1985. This is followed by beautiful excerpts from the current album, but also older hits like 'All This Time' and 'Englishman In New York,' and finally, the immortal 'Roxanne' from his Police days – a truly fantastic song. While much of the song on this evening sounds like it came straight from a record, it is played down and degraded to a sing-along number.

Even with the Police, it was jazz fans who played the successful punk bastard. Sting works similarly solo: His songs are much more eclectic and complex than they ultimately appear on stage. After all, he's brought two jazz musicians, trumpeter Chris Botti and pianist Jason Rebello, into the live band, and so, less than two minutes after the guitarist, the crowd in the stadium welcomes the trumpeter to the ramp for a solo in a rock 'n' roll pose. Sting makes it possible: the pop-tinged country song 'Fill Her Up' unravels into a jazz jam, the clairvoyant jealousy scene of 'Perfect Love...Gone Wrong' is thrummed by a quiet hip-hop beat and a Miles Davis trumpet, until drummer Manu Katché, now also at the front of the ramp, unleashes a torrent of Francophone raps.

He just loves musical bastards, Sting explained in a recent interview. Of course, his bastards don't come from the streets like the dog they called rock 'n' roll. They grow up in remote duplex apartments and turn out to be comfortable, admittedly, but also somewhat well-behaved. And by intelligent pop standards, they're sometimes quite clichéd – for example, when the New Orleans tune 'Moon Over Bourbon Street' marches in, naturally roughened up, with a trumpet player mutated from Miles Davis into Louis Armstrong, or when the current, quite charming hit 'Desert Rose' leads into a prospectus-like desert and promptly bonfires light up on stage. So it's hard to return enthusiasm. The band can do everything, but they miss the soul, the funk, the rock and roll. Even the appeal generally inherent in musical bastards – the friction, the surprise, the breaking of convention, the recoloured soul – is missing from Sting's music. Mr. Sumner's bastards sound like textbook fare. His performance is standard, well-crafted stadium rock, nothing more, nothing less. A little more likeable than the rest, that's for sure.

(c) Aargauerzeitung by Christoph Fellmann