I want everyone in the room to kind of feel the same, all at once, together.” What I do with my music is a little different. It feels like he’s talking to you, not the person sitting next to you. “He’s always having this intimate conversation with the whole room. “I sit in the back of the theater and watch him, to be inspired and to learn,” she said. Bennett, Lady Gaga variously struck the tone of an awed admirer and a grateful peer. Lady Gaga.”)Ĭharacterizing her experience with Mr.
They were still dressed for television - he in a navy suit, she in a tawny robe and Cleopatra makeup, with a single dark braid over one shoulder - during an hourlong interview at 30 Rockefeller Center, in a dressing room usually reserved for musical guests on “Saturday Night Live.” (Among the glossy photographs arranged on the walls was one bearing this inscription: “SNL. Listen to some of the best new recordings here. Classical Music: 2021 was a year of reawakening for the art form.Jazz Albums: Even the big-statement albums this year had a feeling of intense closeness.Pop Albums: Recordings with big feelings and room for catharsis made the most powerful connections.Best Songs: A posthumous political statement and a superstar’s 10-minute redo are among the 66 best tracks of 2021.It also suggests a determinedly classy reboot for Lady Gaga, whose most recent solo release, “Artpop,” fell short of her usual blockbuster standards, delivering no transcendent single on the level of “Bad Romance.” From a distance, the collaboration can look like a tactical maneuver for both artists.įrom Lil Nas X to Mozart to Esperanza Spalding here is what we loved listening to this year. Bennett, probably more than anyone, knows all about.
The album, due out Tuesday on Streamline/Columbia/Interscope, represents the latest pop dalliance with the Great American Songbook, something Mr. Accompanied by a big band, a combo and an orchestra, with set and lighting design by the director Robert Wilson, they made the concert into a full-dress preview of their plush new album, “Cheek to Cheek.” Bennett, who turned 88 last month, and Lady Gaga, 60 years his junior, had set up shop at the Rose Theater one night this summer to tape a forthcoming episode of “Great Performances” on PBS. Bennett stood and watched the changeover, one hand resting on the curve of a grand piano, before his gaze turned to the audience, at which point he tossed off a deadpan line: “I can’t wait to get back in show business.”
Then she tottered off for her fourth costume change in six songs, leaving several stagehands to contend with the chair. Moments earlier, he’d been singing the Tin Pan Alley tune “Goody Goody,” while Lady Gaga - polymorphic pop star, supersize cult hero and, for the moment, his co-headliner - muttered coquettish protestations from an enormous rocking chair, cartoon-chic in a pink cocktail dress, a wide-brim black hat and satiny opera gloves. Tony Bennett was waiting, in a Brioni tuxedo and an uncertain silence, onstage at Frederick P.