28 Summers

In Great Scott, the Kansas-born mezzo-soprano, one of today’s best-loved classical singers, creates a role conceived specifically with her in mind. The character she plays, Arden Scott, just happens to be an opera star, and she is the lynchpin of what Fred Plotkin of WQXR, the USA’s leading classical music radio station, welcomed as a “deeply moving and musically brilliant work” that “should enter the standard repertory just as Heggie’s two previous masterpieces – Dead Man Walking and Moby-Dick – already have”.

Charming, lighthearted and fizzing with subversive wit, Neil Armfield's sparkling production of The Marriage of Figaro masterfully captures Mozart's most popular comedic opera. In this classic performance, recorded live at the Sydney Opera House, Patrick Summers conducts an energetic fresh-voiced cast, headed up by baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes and Taryn Feibig who make a vivacious, appealing pairing as Figaro and Susanna, while Peter Coleman-Wright triumphs as the lascivious Count Almaviva.

The former Police guitarist's first solo instrumental album turns out to be a gentle, thoroughly domesticated continuation of his looping soundscapes with Robert Fripp earlier in the 1980s ("I Advance Masked"). Keyboardist David Hentschel is a co-conspirator on several tracks, though Summers is perfectly content to go it alone on others. With its repeated guitar loops, interactive counterlines, gentle washes of keyboards, advancing and receding waves of effects, Summers is out to sooth and refresh, not to challenge and disturb - and the music drifts lazily toward the shores of the soporific New Age. "Shining Sea" definitely has a kinship with the sound of the Fripp collaborations, but shorn of their forbidding edges, and the rest floats in and out, leaving barely a trace behind. It's all very pretty and it all sounds somewhat innocuous today, now that the phenomenon of tape or digital loops is no longer an avant-garde pet preserve.

Comprised of selections originally mixed and mastered in 1978 from the albums by the electronic composer featuring The Police's Sting and Andy Summers.
This is probably the most unlikely thing you'll ever expect from the Police: them playing full-on prog rock complete with Mellotron. OK, so the idea is actually coming from electronic keyboardist/symphony conducter Eberhard Schoener, but he released two albums with Police members in it in 1978, Flashback and Video Magic (the German original, not the compilation featuring tracks from both). Sting and Andy Summers are on both, but Stewart Copeland only appeared on Flashback, while Evert Fraterman filled in Copeland's shoes on Video Magic. Andy Summers had already appeared on several Eberhard Schoener albums as far back as 1975…

Comprised of selections originally mixed and mastered in 1978 from the albums by the electronic composer featuring The Police's Sting and Andy Summers.
This is probably the most unlikely thing you'll ever expect from the Police: them playing full-on prog rock complete with Mellotron. OK, so the idea is actually coming from electronic keyboardist/symphony conducter Eberhard Schoener, but he released two albums with Police members in it in 1978, Flashback and Video Magic (the German original, not the compilation featuring tracks from both). Sting and Andy Summers are on both, but Stewart Copeland only appeared on Flashback, while Evert Fraterman filled in Copeland's shoes on Video Magic. Andy Summers had already appeared on several Eberhard Schoener albums as far back as 1975…

On Andy Summers and Robert Fripp's second album, Bewitched, the duo offered a new batch of their instrumental songs, which turned out to be much more rock-oriented than their texturized 1982 debut, I Advance Masked. The album was originally going to be a more musically varied affair - at the time, Summers talked about recording calypso and Tex-Mex/Ry Cooder-like tunes with Fripp, but they never saw the light of day. Like its predecessor, it contains plenty of great guitar work, with songwriting being stressed over instrumental virtuosity. For example, Summers and Fripp know how to subtly insert challenging sections into their songs (such as the 7/4 time signature in "Maquillage"), without making them seem like an obvious attempt to impress fellow musicians…

On Andy Summers and Robert Fripp's second album, Bewitched, the duo offered a new batch of their instrumental songs, which turned out to be much more rock-oriented than their texturized 1982 debut, I Advance Masked. The album was originally going to be a more musically varied affair - at the time, Summers talked about recording calypso and Tex-Mex/Ry Cooder-like tunes with Fripp, but they never saw the light of day. Like its predecessor, it contains plenty of great guitar work, with songwriting being stressed over instrumental virtuosity. For example, Summers and Fripp know how to subtly insert challenging sections into their songs (such as the 7/4 time signature in "Maquillage"), without making them seem like an obvious attempt to impress fellow musicians…

An atmospheric collection of compositions that would be the perfect backdrop for vistas of sunsets in exotic lands, Summers went a little more mainstream with this release than he had with Mysterious Barricades and his two projects with Robert Fripp. The textures here have more in common with his work as guitarist for the Police, though his playing is better highlighted in this solo context. Titles such as "The Island of Silk" and "Rain Forest in Manhattan" give a clue as to the almost dreamlike feel Summers is going for. He is largely successful, his uniquely fluid guitar tone combining with instruments such as wooden flute, percussion, oboe, and xianjiang tambourine, while "Piya Tose" features Indian vocalist Najma Akhtar. It's an at once soothing and adventurous album and is highly recommended.

What begins like a fairy-tale turns into a whimsical fantasy halfway between magic farce and Masonic mysticism: The Magic Flute links a love story with the great questions of the Enlightenment, juxtaposes bird-catcher charm with queenly vengeance, and bewitches the listener with music that mixes cheerful melodies, lovers’ arias, show-stopping coloraturas and mysterious chorales.