Symphonicity: 2010/11

Stylish Stillness...

The Gahr Støre family sits right in front of me, and its pater familias makes three feeble attempts during Sting's second number, 'Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic'. Things are going wrong. Gahr Støre is a white man.

He doesn't stand out much. In the row in front of him is his new "BFF", Crown Princess Mette-Marit (and I thought she only listened to house music twelve-inchers from the 1990s). The entire hall seems full of well-groomed people from shipowner families and the no-nonsense elite.

Sting's class trip makes Mette-Marit's appear like a quick trip to the corner kiosk. Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner from Newcastle in England, the son of a milkman, was supposed to become a sailor at best.

But here he is, 58 years old, in front of a 45-piece symphony orchestra. He slaps softly on a tambourine and looks sickeningly good. It's all tantric sex. He's wearing black trousers and a black butler-cut suit jacket. His hairline, which had long seemed like a lost cause, has miraculously and probably expensively stopped at a strategically acceptable point. I bet you could bounce crowns on his tight little ass.

He's standing here, I think, because he's in an artistic slump, terrified of making a new pop album. His last one came as far back as 2003, and we have to go back another ten years to find his last really good one: 'Ten Summoner's Tales' from 1993.

While he's waiting, he's doing things like reuniting The Police, making a "winter album" of traditional folk music material, interpreting the composer John Dowland (1563-1626) and writing film music.

And this: Playing his hits with the help of bass, guitar, drums, percussion, a female vocalist and a symphony orchestra conducted by Steven Mercurio. The latter jumps around like an eccentric professor (he looks like the silver fox Støre, in fact), and otherwise behaves like "Tim the Enchanter" in "Monty Python and the Knights of the Round Table". He points, and there's sound.

This will be pop music - nothing more, nothing less - it's not like Sting wants to "go classical" or anything like that regrettably. Sting wants to hear his songs played by an extra large "band". He has long since learned to live with the fact that he is so self-indulgent.

Crown Prince Haakon arrives at his wife's side just in time for 'Russians', Sting's attempt at Cold War diplomacy from 1985. The artist pre-empts easy fun by explaining the climate that actually prevailed back then. The lyric line "the Russians love their children too" sounds ridiculous in 2010. But I - probably Gahr Støre too - remember well that it didn't feel that way when the song was first released.

The song is dressed in one of the most radical arrangements of the evening, with a dramatic, "defcon 2" intro. Anxiety and trembling. Sting sings it in his best silver boy voice.

Not everything works so well. Parts of the second set - he plays for two and a half hours - become tough.

'Moon Over Bourbon Street' reminds us of what a stiff-necked actor he was in his time. Sting dons a coat with a red "vampire" lining, plays the theremin and squirms his way through the clichéd Anne Rice drama, added to the most avant-garde arrangement of the evening.

"All Would Envy" is a drag Kaffebrenneriet bossa nova, and 'Every Breath You Take' loses all its gnawing, creeping horror in this recording. The whole point of the song is lost.

But otherwise? Gordon Sumner, the son of a milkman, is an artist - no doubt about it. Sings well, writes wisely.

He doesn't move everyone. Nor does this reviewer, at least not always. But he moves many, including Jonas Gahr Støre.

Although not in time.

(c) VG Nett by Morten Ståle Nilsen