Albums of the week: three new releases
Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga: Love for Sale Polydor £10.99
For his 61st studio album, the great Tony Bennett has once again paired up with Lady Gaga, with whom he recorded a wonderful album of jazz duets in 2014, said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the FT. This time, the unlikely duo (who have a mere 60 years between them) focus on Cole Porter standards, and the result is a glorious display of “wit, skill, feeling and musicianship”, with a healthy dose of “old-school Broadway razzle-dazzle”.
Bennett is 95. His voice is “sandpapered” thin with age, whereas Gaga “purrs and preens in shades of velvet and honey”, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. It’s “a partnership of contrast and complement rather than perfect harmony”, and it works: each occupies “distinct spaces of melodic arrangements while interacting with rhythmic wit and oodles of swaggering personality”. This could be Bennett’s last album. He recently revealed that he has Alzheimer’s, and he has officially retired from the stage. But on the evidence of this “delightful” record, “the last of the crooners is going out swinging”.
Nao: And Then Life Was Beautiful
RCA £10.99
Neo Jessica Joshua – the English R&B artist and producer who records as Nao – had a “tricky” time last year, said Kitty Empire in The Observer. She had to contend not only with the global pandemic, but also a major break-up and the birth of a baby – events that have clearly shaped this “gamechanging” third album. On it, Nao soars to new heights, detailing her emotional journey with “hard-won insight” and musical self-assurance. She sings about not settling for unhappiness, and the optimism of new parenthood.
If her last collection, Saturn, was shimmering and “cosmic”, then this album is “grounded” and intimate, said Annabel Nugent in The Independent. Lyrically, the 13 songs “vibrate with joy”. Musically, Nao “glides between R&B, soul, gospel, funk, Afrobeats and her scholastic roots in jazz”. But even with all that going on, it’s still her astonishing vocals – “part nervous flutter, part helium-inflected falsetto” – that “take the cake”, as she dextrously flexes between high notes and lower registers at the most unexpected moments.
Schumann: Alle Lieder (Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber)
Sony Classical, 11 CDs £74.99
Back in 1988, it was hearing Robert Schumann’s Lieder for the first time that inspired baritone Christian Gerhaher – then a student of philosophy in Munich – to ask a pianist he knew from his schooldays, Gerold Huber, if they might start playing some songs together. In the years that followed, the pair established themselves as the “greatest partnership in singing”, said David Allen in The New York Times. And now that partnership has come full circle with this magisterial 11-disc boxset of all Schumann’s songs.
It’s a “fine, constantly rewarding set”, said Andrew Clements in The Observer – and Schumann lovers will find it “irresistible”. Every song is delivered with the “fastidious attention to detail and to the individual colouring of each phrase that has always been a feature of Gerhaher’s Lieder singing”. Singers including Camilla Tilling and Julia Kleiter have been recruited for duets and part-songs with piano. And the set comes with full texts, translations and a useful index, as well as brief notes on each opus by Gerhaher himself.