Specs & Pricing

she vamps like a torch singer at the opening
and then picks up the tempo to run through
a series of Baroque-tinged variations with
puckish humor. The Air from the Goldberg
Variations begins with directionless doodling
before settling into sprightly, light-fingered
variations that lead to a much-decorated
statement of the theme and a coda with more
than a whiff of ragtime.
The engineering is true to her sound,
which can get edgy, and encompasses her
wide dynamic range, from the powerful
opening of the D minor Toccata BWV 565
to the wispiness of the slower pieces. It’s
also well-detailed, as in the fleet-fingered
articulation of the Italian Concerto’s Presto.
But for spiced-up Bach, stick with Jacques
Loussier. DD
Further Listening: Montero: Recital;
Jacques Loussier: Plays Bach
Sting: Songs from
the Labyrinth.
Music by John Dowland. Edin
Karamazov, lute. Sting and
Karamazov, producers; Donal
Hodgson, engineer. Deutsche
Grammophon 06025 170 3139.
Who knew Gordon Matthew Sumner,
known to the multitudes as Sting, plays the
lute. I carefully checked my old Police LPs
for lute credits. Nothing. It turns out that
Sting is fairly new to the instrument. A few
years back, a member of his band gave him
a gift of a custom-made nine-course lute and
now the rock star has released a disc of music
by English Renaissance composer John
Dowland.
Actually, most of the lute playing here
comes courtesy of the Serbian musician Edin
Karamazov, who served as a mentor to Sting.
Karamazov’s playing is the best part of this
release, and a little hyperkinetic for some
tastes—he’s no Paul O’Dette or Anthony
Rooley—but accomplished and propulsive.
Sting plays only in the background beneath his
portentous recitation of excerpts from a 1595
letter Dowland wrote to Queen Elizabeth’s
Secretary of State, and in one duet. But the
vocals are all Sting, and Elizabethan airs are
not his strong suit.
His Dowland is at once anachronistically
overblown and strangely flat and
unresponsive to the texts. He sees Dowland
as “an archetype…of the alienated singersongwriter”
but these performances lack
the sense of profound introspection that
so many others have brought to the music.
Compare Sting’s version of “In darkness let
me dwell” to that by the late Alfred Deller.
The latter’s quiet, soulful rendition has plenty
of emotional range but seems directed to one
or two listeners—maybe just to himself on a
moonless, desperate night. Sting’s playing to an
arena-sized crowd; his phrasing is frequently
coarse and his shaping of the songs awkward.
Worse are the couple of partsongs on which
he overdubs all the voices; these come off
dangerously close to bad 70s art-rock.
The sound is very close up and aggressive,
airless with harsh vocal sibilants and too much
extraneous noise from the lutenist sliding and
scraping the strings of his instrument. A bad
idea, poorly executed. AQ
Further Listening: Dowland: Airs &
Partsongs (Deller Consort); Dowland:
Honey from the Hive (Kirkby/Rooley)
(SACD)
December 2006 The Absolute Sound 141