Tony Bennett is 92 years old, and at an age when most of us will hope to have been retired for a quarter century, he’s playing two consecutive sold-out nights at the Albert Hall. He surely doesn’t do it for the money – the New York native won back the fortune he squandered in the 70s via a career renaissance that began almost 30 years ago, and never really abated. He remains a busy recording artist, following 2014’s Lady Gaga collaboration Cheek to Cheek and high-profile duets with Norah Jones, Aretha and Amy Winehouse with last year’s chart-topping revisit of the Great American Songbook in the company of contemporary jazz star Diana Krall, Love Is Here to Stay.
Tonight, his Tony Bennett Quartet keep things spry, their swing never less than mellifluous, but with a restless bustle and combustive solos that prevent the hall ever feeling like the world’s roomiest elevator. They also back the opening singer, Donna Byrne, who’s at best a cruise-ship crooner, her voice a maudlin blancmange, wobbling in all the right places but never making the songs hers.
By contrast, Bennett’s voice, once so smooth, has weathered over recent years, growing raspy, yellowing like old newspaper, and not always able to hit every note of his melodies. But while this mars a sprightly I’ve Got Rhythm, this aged quality, this vulnerability – Bennett’s very 92-ness – lend new poignancy to these songs. The setlist seems hand-picked for wry references to age – Bennett laughs gently after singing “As I approach the prime of my life,” in This Is All I Ask, and requesting: “Beautiful girls, walk a little slower when you walk by me.” But he’s not only poking fun at his advanced years; there’s a sadness, too, the weight of the years passing, so his voice breaks as he sings “I will stay younger than spring”, with a yearning for this to be true.
Weaved among his more upbeat standards, these darker, more impassioned moments are perhaps unexpectedly resonant; Duke Ellington’s (In My) Solitude is brittle and moving, Bennett taunted “by memories that never die”, while James Ingram’s How Do You Keep the Music Playing? takes on a new meaning as he sings “How do you keep the song from fading?”, clearly reluctant to relinquish the stage that he loves. Deftly escorted there by his quartet, he reaches closing crescendos of torch song emotion that are almost operatic, and anything but easy listening.
He closes with Fly Me to the Moon, and if the subtlety of his voice is gone, the power remains. And while pretenders-to-the-throne like Bublé might deliver such songs with a polish now beyond Bennett’s reach, they can’t sing them as if they’ve lived every word of them, every last disappointment and fleeting spark of love, the way Tony does tonight. That he can do it at all, at his age, is remarkable enough; that his cheating of the final curtain is so moving and ultimately joyous tonight makes Bennett treasurable.
