Album review: Love For Sale, by Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga

They may belong to different eras, but the two New Yorkers sparkle together on an album of Cole Porter songs 

Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett

★★★★☆

Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga are artists from different universes. He’s the 95-year-old king of the smoothies, perhaps second only to friend and rival Frank Sinatra in the pantheon of golden-era crooners. Gaga is a cybernetic pop star, last seen setting virtual dance floors alight with 2020’s grippingly futuristic Chromatica album (and who will next materialise affecting a terrible Italian accent as socialite Patrizia Reggiani in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci).

Yet they are also friends and collaborators with lashings of chemistry. And their second collection of duets – following on from 2014’s Cheek To Cheek – is an irresistibly stomping affair that finds the two swapping lines like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn throwing up sparks in a sepia rom-com.

Featuring lavish orchestral arrangements by Bennett’s long-time foil, Jorge Calandrelli, Love For Sale collects 10 of the pair’s favourite Cole Porter songs. They’ve clearly come to lionise rather than to interrogate Porter’s status as one of the most important songwriters of the 20th century. There is no tiptoeing through the material or attempts at a post-modern makeover.

It’s broad, a little cheesy, and bristling with old-school chutzpah. That is made obvious as Bennett and Gaga plunge headlong into I Get A Kick Out Of You, perhaps best known as a Sinatra hit and here recreated as a game of vocal booth volleyball between the two singers.

Bennett, who has Parkinson's, has stated this is to be his final album (it will be the 61st of his career). Yet his singing remains remarkably spry and steeped in emotion as he and Gaga bustle their way through It’s De-Lovely, Love for Sale, and Night and Day (Bennett performs solo vocals on Just One of Those Things, Gaga on Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall In Love)).

For Bennett it’s a more than fitting swan song. And for Gaga it’s a reminder that, when not blasting off into the further reaches of pop, she's an old-time entertainer with charm to spare.