Sting celebrated Valentine’s Day with the San Francisco Symphony on Wednesday in Davies Hall, singing great songs from his long, illustrious career and telling the stories behind them.
It was a nearly perfect show, the only fault being that the prolific musician (calling it a “profound honor” to appear with the classy orchestra) could have touched on even more from his deep and wide catalog of Police and solo tunes.
“I’m chuffed,” he said, looking suave in all black, greeting listeners in the sold-out hall after taking a seat onstage in front of the full orchestra, led by Edwin Outwater. Sting said his wife Trudie [Styler] was in the audience, cutely calling their 44-year partnership a show-business anomaly that should be measured in dog years.
The intimate setting provided the songwriter the opportunity to begin with the story of how, in the 1970s, he was an innocent schoolteacher from an English village near Scotland’s border playing in a London band on a low-budget tour that ended in Paris—where the group shared seedy lodgings with ladies of the night.
Fascinated by them and prompted by a poster for a production of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” Sting said he “conjured up a woman that changed my life beyond all recognition.”
“Roxanne” — the Police’s first American single and later a signature tune —sounded sublime backed by the orchestra’s lush strings in this concert hall version. Rob Mathes, producer, composer and longtime Sting collaborator at the keyboards, did the uniformly gorgeous arrangements of the evening’s selections.
In the 1980s, after Sting moved to New York, he met Quentin Crisp. Sting said the famed elderly gay British raconteur whose life in the U.S. ultimately worked out (he was pleased to be a legal alien) inspired him to write “Englishman in New York.” The rapt audience briefly sang along with its wise, inclusive refrain, “Be yourself, no matter what they say” and clarinetist Carey Bell played the distinctive solo.
Perhaps the most rockin’ tune of the show was “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” including another sing-along on the e-ohs.
“Fields of Gold,” an ethereal number (again benefiting by the majestic sound of a live orchestra), Sting said, came about simply as a response to harvest time in the English countryside in the castle near Stonehenge he and Trudie purchased in the 1990s. (“If you knock on the door, I’ll make you a cup of tea,” he said, to the audience’s delight.)
A writer of many love songs, Sting called 1994’s ballad “When We Dance” interesting because it’s about, “I love you and you love somebody else”; then shared his love for country music in “I Hung My Head,” which was covered by Johnny Cash, but not particularly twangy in the symphony hall.
The beautiful and melancholy “Why Should I Cry for You?” describes tensions between fathers and sons, something Sting witnessed in his family of seafarers from a shipbuilding town. He developed the theme in his song cycle and musical “The Last Ship,” from which he played “Practical Arrangement” and “What Say You Meg?” (The show’s 2020 engagement in San Francisco was cut short due to COVID.)
A song about fox hunting, or about two lovers against the world, is how Sting described “The End of the Game,” his wife’s favorite of his songs, while the mysterious and haunting “Shape of My Heart” explores how all gamblers are philosophers, he said.
Associate concertmaster Wyatt Underhill tore up the dramatic, nearly violent, violin solo on a new tune from 2021, “What Could Have Been,” from the video game Arcade, while “Russians,” written about the Cold War, unfortunately has become politically relevant again.
Sting’s vocals got a touch ragged on “King of Pain,” from The Police’s final studio album, with its eminently sing-able chorus, eclipsed only by “Every Breath You Take,” which, according to Wikipedia, music licensing giant BMI in 2019 named the most played song in radio history.
Sting encored with the lively, North African-tinged “Desert Rose” and ended with “Fragile,” playing a special red-and-blue painted guitar handmade by inmates of a high security prison in Italy. (Its location in an Italian town, he said, is the subject his filmmaker wife’s new documentary “An Ode to Naples.”)
With vivid images of nature, poetic lyrics evoking the range of human emotion, commanding rhythms and stick-in-your-mind melodies, the concert’s two closing tunes (like much of Sting’s output) exemplify just why he remains a pop music superstar.