POP MUSIC REVIEW : Sting’s Soulful Surprises : The British singer-songwriter balances entertainment and art in a Wiltern show that combines celebration with mourning.

If Gordon Sumner wants to temporarily shelve the name Sting for another word beginning with “S”, the one he might adopt for his new world tour is Surprise.

That element was the British rock singer-songwriter’s frequent companion Monday night at the Wiltern Theatre, where he and a three-piece band put on a warm, brilliantly designed two-hour concert that was even more satisfying, on balance, than Paul Simon’s recent, triumphant series of shows.

There was a seductive, unpredictable quality to both Sting’s manner and music as he balanced entertainment and art in a way that, perhaps inadvertently, challenged the charges of “distant” and “pretentious” that have been often leveled at him over the years by detractors.

Remarkably, Sting accomplished this on a tour that centers on music from his new “The Soul Cages” album, a somber, hugely ambitious work built around coming to grips with the 1987 death of his father.

That’s not exactly your standard pop party fare and it’s a potential land mine for anyone prone to take himself and his art too seriously.

So, the first surprise Monday was Sting’s manner.

Dressed fashionably downscale with black vest, black shirt and black pants torn at both knees (one point for the detractors), he came out at the start of the show to introduce both support acts, the country-flavored Kennedy Rose duo and jazz-accented singer-percussionist Vinx (one point for Sting).

It was a gracious gesture designed to help assure the acts of more attention than they would otherwise have received on a night when the audience was so primed for the headliner.

When Sting returned with the band, he was in a relaxed, playful mood--asking for requests at one point even though he knew that all the voices would drown each other out in the subsequent shouting.

He also took a good-natured jab at himself, referring indirectly to the battering he took from reviewers in 1989 when he starred in “3 Penny Opera” on Broadway.

Noting the tour, which began last week in Berkeley, was still in the shakedown stage, he pointed out after an instrumental number that there had been two mistakes in the playing--both his.

“But you probably didn’t even notice because I kept a straight face,” he offered. “So you see I can act.”

The more important surprises of the evening, however, centered on his music.

Given the seriousness of the album and its early public reception (more than 1 million copies sold in just two weeks), it made sense to play the album in its entirety at the start of the show.

Instead, he opened with “All This Time,” which is the current single from the album. A hit on both mainstream rock and alternative/college rock radio formats, the song has a lilting melody but its theme about religious rites, death and life’s purpose gives it an angry, bittersweet edge.

He followed with three other songs from the album, the obsessive “Mad About You,” the satirical “Jeremiah Blues” and, most significantly, “Why Should I Cry for You?”

The latter is a delicate yet eloquent look at the questions and confusion of a son who never had a good relationship with his father and suddenly finds himself, through his father’s death, unable ever to correct the situation.

Sample lyrics:

Why should I cry for you?

Why would you want me to?

And what would it mean to say

That I loved you in my fashion?

He followed his own composition--surprise--with a version of Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and the even more surprising thing was that the rendition worked well.

“Ain’t No Sunshine” has been recorded no doubt hundreds of times since Withers wrote it in the early ‘70s, but the interpretations have usually been either woefully understated or annoying melodramatic.

Sting’s was tenderly soulful, serving as a gentle acknowledgement of the healing power of music.

With the evening’s first artistic and emotional point established, the band then entertained the audience with some oldies, including “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” from Sting’s Police days and “Consider Me Gone” from an earlier solo album.

By this time, it was an hour into the concert and it appeared that Sting, who played bass, was going to concentrate on reinterpreting some of his older material with his new band, which consists of keyboardist David Sancious, guitarist Dominic Miller and drummer Vinnie Colauita.

The trio doesn’t offer the intoxicating rhythmic textures of the more jazz-flavored lineups that accompanied Sting on his earlier solo tours, but it compensates with a sharper and more accessible tone. Sancious, especially, contributed greatly to the overall shading, giving the music all sorts of surprising twists and punctuation.

After just three older tunes, however, Sting again shifted direction--playing the remaining songs from his new album in an interlocking 30-minute cycle.

Where “All This Time” and “Why Should I Cry for You?” are overtly autobiographical expressions of loss, Sting deals with some of the same questions on the album’s remaining songs in a more abstract, literary way.

In such songs as “Island of Souls” and “When the Angels Fall,” he speaks of a young boy wanting to take his father, who lost his life in a coal mining accident, across the sea to a magical land where they could be reunited and live in a more peaceful and idealistic setting.

Rather than try to re-create the intensity of the studio or his own mourning period, Sting wisely treats the songs on stage as merely compositions, playing them faithfully but without a trace of artificial Angst.

Still, the music was draining emotionally and, in yet another surprise, he followed it with a version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” that was so robust and cleansing that it made much of what followed--including such oldies as “Message in a Bottle” and “Every Breath You Take”--a bit anti-climatic.

But the encore number, “Fragile,” proved both a fitting benediction to the concert itself and a poignant reflection on a world at war.

Sting’s art has improved album by album and tour by tour since he left the Police in the mid-’80s and this tour--which is expected to return to Los Angeles late this summer--keeps that remarkable, surprising streak alive.