Mention the phrase “nothing like the sun” to pop fans and many will roll their eyes at the thought of Sting’s heaviest-going album. As he filched the title from a Shakespeare sonnet, news that a crossover group of musicians has turned some of the Bard’s most revered poems into song may bring Sting to mind again. With his lute. Happily, however, the spirit of Blackadder is not abroad in this Opera North and Royal Shakespeare Company joint venture, also called Nothing Like the Sun. There’s no horsing around in doublet and hose. Promise.

Nor should audiences at Stratford next weekend worry about violent sonic injury being inflicted on these immortal verses. Dubstep remixes of “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” or punk-funk takes on “Let me confess that we two must be twain” are off limits. Instead, the composer Gavin Bryars is curating the project, drafting in two early-music specialists, the tenor John Potter (formerly of the Hilliard Ensemble) and the Swedish soprano Anna Maria Friman, as vocalists. The sonnet settings of five invited writer-collaborators will be played by an Opera North band, including Bryars on double bass and James Woodrow on electric guitar.

Yet anybody familiar with Bryars’s history of free-form iconoclasm would hardly rule out the unexpected. For instance, the sound of leaves being crushed — sampled in a version “for tape and ensemble” of “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun” (to give the line its due) by the folktronica maven Mira Calix. The others on Bryars’s polyphonic guest list are “the Irish Tom Waits”, Gavin Friday, the violinist Alexander Balanescu, the alt-country chanteuse Natalie Merchant (formerly of 10,000 Maniacs) and Antony Hegarty of the Mercury-winning Antony and the Johnsons, who comes as a pair with his songwriting partner, Nico Muhly.

Scheduling problems prevent them all performing in person. A tragic loss, you might suppose, in Hegarty’s case, as his cross-gendered singing voice seems exquisitely Shakespearian, though Muhly insists that their setting is “out of his range”. But having one group of players generates a coherent aesthetic for this two-part programme. The first features the invited arrangements; the second is a premiere of a 40-minute work by Bryars, known for lugubrious minimalism, that incorporates eight sonnets on the theme of time’s depredations and the poet’s enduringly “powerful rhyme”.

Each account tends to treat the words in a “conversational” manner, while the music conjures various species of melancholy. Taken as a whole, they represent the sonnets component of the RSC’s Complete Works Festival and anticipate a Shakespeare season at Opera North this autumn. But despite the origins of the form — in the Italian “ sonetto ” or “little song” — settings of Shakespeare sonnets are relatively rare. Only a few front-rank composers — notably Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Britten — have tackled them, in contrast to the copious versions of Shakespeare’s own songs and works inspired by the plays. Why?

According to Daniel Albright, a Harvard professor whose next book, Musicking Shakespeare, is due this summer, the answer could relate to how the English sonnet evolved. “In Italy, the Petrarchan sonnet [composed of an eight-line and a six-line stanza] helped drive the new art of madrigal,” he says. “With its elegantly poised pivot between one affekt and another, the madrigal matches exactly the ‘turn’ in the middle of Petrarchan sonnets. In England, the sonnet seems less intimately musical. Its fanciful, discursive, strangely splayed tone — half addressed to the cruel fair, half to the accumulating body of previous sonnets — may have discouraged composers.”

Bryars, who has set a number of Petrarch’s sonnets, believes the “musical culture” established by Shakespeare’s plays may be a factor. Songs such as Full Fathom Five and It Was a Lover and His Lass have the properties of weird folk or courtly pastoral, which later captivated Roger Quilter and Hubert Parry, both avid setters of traditional English lyrics. The result being, Bryars says, “you might feel obliged to move into that sort of pastiche”.

Equally, Shakespeare’s sonnets — with their three tightly argued quatrains and final aphoristic couplet — may be too daunting, too literary, for a lot of composers to grapple with when easier material is already at hand. As Albright observes, many of the operas derived from the plays show “little interest in Shakespeare beyond the stories he has to tell”.

Muhly, an emerging composer in his own right, describes sonnet-setting as a “bizarre thing to do unless asked”. Music generally works best with “bad texts”, he maintains, saying of Italian opera: “When you read the libretto, it’s often, like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ But it sounds gorgeous.” He and Hegarty settled on “Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed” as their contribution, a nocturne for a tale of nighttime obses-siveness — yet choosing it was difficult. “Those that appealed to me most as poems seemed the least appealing as songs,” Muhly explains. “The words were so delicious that you don’t want to muddy stuff up with people singing them. Ours isn’t a tricky, tonguey sonnet — the atmosphere is moody in a more theatrical way, where instruments help rather than distract.”

His sentiments are not unusual. The sonnets have long been precious to readers and scholars, not least because of their biographical mysteries: who is the “lovely Boy” to whom the majority are addressed? Who is the Dark Lady, who becomes the object of the poet’s affections? Both the language and the lineage of these complex poems arguably make this musical enterprise look high-risk. But Bryars bats away concerns about what some people’s reaction could be with a gruff Yorkshire confidence.

“It would be wrong to say I don’t give a toss, but potential criticism can’t be a reason for not doing something. Certain Shakespeare specialists may feel the sonnets are sacred, but it’s rather like dealing with Christian funda-mentalists. I imagine some in the 18th century had problems with Bach’s St Matthew Passion.” However these latest sonnet-settings ultimately strike the ear, it’s worth remembering that Shakespeare the dramatist relished clashes of genre. His attitude now would surely be “play on”.

Nothing Like the Sun: The Sonnet Project is at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on Sat and Sun, then touring. For information, visit www.rsc.org.uk

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