After an album of 16th-century Elizabethan-era lute music and another LP of British winter carols from roughly the same era, Sting’s new record of orchestrally-arranged interpretations of his songs seems like a natural progression. Of course, that phrase seems absurd when you consider how, mere decades ago, Sting was the snarling, bleached-blonde frontman for The Police, one of the best rock bands of all time. After disbanding the group in 1984 and releasing a few lofty if great pop albums on his own, the onetime Gordon Sumner seems content to make music to score wine-tasting parties (pausing only briefly in 2007 and 2008 to reunite The Police for a mind-blowing tour).

There are many out there who mourn Sting’s fall from brooding, pretentious songwriter to creator of agonizing jaunts like If on a Winter’s Night (the aforementioned winter-carols set). To many of those mourners, Symphonicities looks like another nail in the coffin. But it’s not, for two reasons we must begrudgingly accept: that Sting still has a fantastic voice, and his songwriting abilities haven’t waned over time.

What makes Symphonicities so interesting - besides the pleasant enough arrangements performed by The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, The New York Players and others - is that it plays less like an “orchestral-greatest-hits” record and more like a “orchestral-Sting-songbook” affair. Opening track “Next to You,” the opening track on the first Police record, greatly suffers from a comparative lack of Andy Summers or Stewart Copeland, but it’s still a great song, some 32 years later. And outside of stalwarts “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” and “Roxanne” (heard enough times in our lives to allow us to steal the song away from Sting), The Police catalogue is mostly untouched, save for a gorgeous B-side, “I Burn for You.”

And when covering his solo path, Sting takes all the back roads, touching on album tracks (“I Hung My Head,” a Mercury Falling track perfectly recast as a Magnificent Seven-type soundscape), B-sides (“End of the Game,” “The Pirate’s Bride”) or singles all but the most diehard fans had forgotten (the peppy “Englishman in New York,” the fantastic “When We Dance”). It makes you wish he’d substituted “Roxanne” (easily the most boring track on the album, despite the timelessness of the song) for something like “Straight to My Heart,” off the Nothing Like the Sun album, or early-‘90s balladry like “Mad About You” or “Why Should I Cry for You” (the latter is in fact a bonus track on iTunes).

In the end, Symphonicities is, if nothing else, a pleasant reminder that for all Sting’s near-insufferable eccentricities - that lute! - he has remained a more-than-serviceable songwriter. One can only hope his next step involves putting pen to paper and showing his talents anew.