Sting with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra at Cruzan Amphitheatre, July 2, 2010

Premier Guide Miami was on the scene. Here is what we witnessed.

Forty-five musicians. A full orchestra. Sting at the center of it, and the songs you thought you knew sounding like you were hearing them for the first time. Sting with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra at Cruzan Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach on July 2, 2010 belonged to the second category. This was not a nostalgia tour dressed up in strings. It was a genuine reimagining — forty-five musicians under the baton of Maestro Steven Mercurio transforming songs that have defined popular music for four decades into something that felt, improbably, brand new.

The setlist was a career survey: "Roxanne," "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic," "Every Breath You Take," "Englishman in New York," "Fragile," "Russians," "If I Ever Lose My Faith in You," "Fields of Gold," "Desert Rose." Songs most audiences have heard hundreds of times. Yet stripped of their original production and rebuilt from the ground up for orchestra, each one arrived with the weight of a first hearing. The brass section on "Roxanne" was visceral. The strings on "Fields of Gold" were devastating.

Sting was flanked by a small ensemble of trusted collaborators — guitarist Dominic Miller, percussionist David Cossin, vocalist Jo Lawry, bassist Ira Coleman — whose presence kept the evening from tipping into pure classical recital. The interplay between Coleman's bass and the orchestra's low strings was a masterclass in restraint. Lawry's harmonies on several numbers added a dimension the studio recordings never had.

The Cruzan Amphitheatre setting — open air, a warm South Florida night, the full orchestra spread across a stage that rarely hosts anything of this scale — was exactly right. The venue's intimacy relative to an arena gave the performance a directness that a larger room would have diluted. When Sting addressed the crowd between songs, the conversation felt genuine rather than scripted.

This tour had its roots in Sting's 2008 collaboration with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and deepened through subsequent work with the Philadelphia Orchestra. By the time it reached South Florida, the arrangements had been refined to a level of precision that showed. Nothing felt like an experiment. Everything felt considered. The Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra tour stands as one of the most artistically ambitious undertakings of Sting's solo career — and the Cruzan Amphitheatre show was among its finest nights.