Sting's latest artistic venture, despite being pregnant with pratfall potential, is a remarkable triumph. "Haunted" for 20 years by the maudlin music of the Elizabethan songwriter and lutenist John Dowland, Sting has recruited Bosnian lute maestro Edin Karamazov to record an album of Dowland's compositions, Songs From the Labyrinth. The stage would appear to be set for an evening of over-reaching pretension.

The project is saved, however, by the affection both men clearly feel for their arcane subject. Dowland's music is marked by a doleful, spectral introspection, and Sting subjugates his rock-star ego before the spirit of the songs, filling in their outlines in his pitch-perfect and surprisingly resonant tenor.

Tunes such as Come Again, all febrile sprung rhythms and spindly-yet-sensual counterpoint, are plangent and intimately evocative. Sting gamely plucks his lute and Karamazov is a virtuoso, drawing profound joy and complex vibrations from his arsenal of instruments like a madrigally inclined Jimmy Page.

Famously a former teacher, Sting approaches the evening with a pedagogue's air, explaining the minutiae of Dowland's life, and reading excerpts from the composer's correspondence between songs. This attention to detail enhances the delicate delights of a gossamer ditty such as Have You Seen the Bright Lily Grow, written for the soundtrack of a play by Ben Jonson.

"I've played to some of the biggest audiences in history, over half-a-million people at a time," says Sting in closing, "but I've never felt as nervous as I did tonight." Such trepidation was unnecessary: against all expectations, this was a genuine tour de force.