“An evening with Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga”

Photo: Marco Piraccini / Archive Marco Piraccini / Portfolio Mondadori via Getty Images

Although unused for the past 18 months, the 6,105 red velvet chairs at Radio City Music Hall will likely need a tune-up by the end of this week thanks to Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga and the 27 standing ovations the couple received during their miraculous and magnificent concert there on Thursday evening (August 5).

This was the second and final performance of “One Last Time: An Evening With Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga,” and sold-out audiences had come to pay their respects – and in its best glitter and dazzle. Many dressed for the occasion in ball gowns, tuxedos, and gem-drenched tuxedo jackets; masks were rare (although attendees had to provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test to enter the venue), but there were even a few rhinestone-studded face covers previously spotted in the swarming Radio lobby City. When Gaga walked in just after 9 p.m., in a sparkling white ball gown, and posed, the crowd – which included Hillary and Bill Clinton, who received a shout from the hostess – stood up. and applauded. When the curtain rose an hour later to reveal Bennett for the first time, standing by the piano with his arms outstretched in elated greeting, they stood – clapping and waving, this time as if they were doing facing an old friend for the first time in years – until he picked up his mic and started singing. The vast majority of those in attendance for Bennett’s final performance at Radio City Music Hall got the mission: we were here to watch a beloved New York icon say goodbye to the stage, with her decorated protégé giving her a voucher. departure.

“One Last Time: An Evening With Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga” was as much a festive comeback as it was a poignant farewell. This week’s shows marked the first time Bennett, who turned 95 on August 3, has performed in public since his family revealed his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in February. Last night’s show was also, as the show’s title suggests, a coda for the singer at the end of a seven-decade career that began across the East River, where a teenager Anthony Benedetto worked as a singer-songwriter in his native Astoria before his sweet tenor won over fans across geography and generations. Although Bennett’s fame in the early 1950s and 1960s earned him deserved accolades, his first Grammy awards, and praise from Frank Sinatra, Bennett experienced an unusual resurgence in his retirement years, when he continued to sing. the standards of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin and the rest of the Great American Songbook with renewed fervor thanks to the success of 1994 MTV unplugged special, which restored its relevance. A handful of albums featuring collaborations with contemporary chart-topping artists – from Billy Joel and Sheryl Crow to Amy Winehouse – followed, reinvigorating the senior statesman’s career.

A collaboration – with another Italian-American New Yorker who loves jazz – has proven to be more fruitful than the others. Lady Gaga, like Bennett, grew up with an affinity for the classics of the Great American Songbook, and was thrilled when he wanted to meet her after watching Nat King Cole’s “Orange Colored Sky” at a benefit concert in 2011. in their hometown. (In Gaga’s first solo set at Radio City, she introduced “Orange Colored Sky” remembering how she briefly panicked that night ten years ago and asked her team to “make me look like a lady, damn it, “switching from latex stage outfits to more subdued outfits to meet Bennett.) Later that year, she joined him to sing a duet of” The Lady Is a Tramp “for her. Duos II: great performances album, kicking off a prolific and chart-topping friendship for the decade that followed; they got out and turned behind Cheek to cheek, their love letter to their beloved standards, in 2014, which debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 graphic.

The duo had worked on Love for sale, Cheek to cheekBennett’s follow-up is scheduled to take place on October 1, following Bennett’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s in 2016. When AARP first reported that Bennett had declined in recent years due to neurodegenerative disease, it was noted that he often seemed bewildered and confused when trying to communicate in the studio, but singing remained a constant in his life. Music is remarkably therapeutic for patients with Alzheimer’s disease, in that it is known to miraculously, albeit temporarily, reconnect the broken strands of memory: Gayatri Devi, Bennett’s neurologist, told the ‘AARP that playing’ kept him on his toes and also stimulated his brain significantly. way, ”a fact evident to the Radio City crowd six months after news of his diagnosis. Bennett did, in fact, seem lucid and downright jovial in Radio City: he was dispersed in time; his vibrato rarely purred out of tune. He went through 17 songs in total, including a catchy trio of numbers with Gaga, his soulful rendition of Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” and a callback to “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”, his hit single. career, with hardly a stumble on a single word. The only reminders of Bennett’s condition came from his sparse on-stage banter between songs and his occasional piano support to back him up: applause was often greeted with a “Wow!” “Or” Magnificent! And nothing more, except a heartfelt thank you for the “beautiful audience” or a triumphant fist raised following a fiery trumpet solo from Brian Newman, a longtime friend and collaborator of Gaga. The set list also offered bittersweet echoes of the importance of the evening. “This Is All I Ask”, a 1958 ballad by Gordon Jenkins that Bennett recorded for his 1960 album Alone together (and again with Josh Groban for Duets II), struck a heartbreaking chord, especially in her last words: “Let the music play, as long as there’s a song to sing / And I’ll stay younger than spring.”

But tears were mostly held back, as “One Last Time: An Evening With Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga” was, without a doubt, a celebration of a life and a legacy that has yet to see the curtain. Gaga, the hostess of the evening, made it very clear throughout her set that that was it for Bennett. She shared personal anecdotes on each occasion, noting before singing Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me” that the ballad was written in 1926, the year Bennett was born; she added that the melody became difficult for her to sing, although every phrase that followed was as beautiful and heartfelt as the sentiment that brought it in. She added that “La Vie en Rose”, a standard by Edith Piaf with which she was amazed in 2018 A star is born, is in his repertoire because of him: “I would never have sung that song if Tony hadn’t told me.” She encouraged audiences to make Bennett smile and laugh before grabbing a top hat and roaring through “New York, New York,” an extravagant and appropriate warm-up for Bennett’s final act. And after making room for Bennett to savor her own projector, she returned, first to sing along with him, then to escort him from the stage – slowly, so he could wave to the sea of ​​hands that made him. sign goodbye.