Committed Anglophile though he is, Tony Bennett had his patience tested by the abrupt curtailment of his first night at the Albert Hall. Looking immaculate in a blue suit with a red handkerchief peeking from the breast pocket, the great crooner was just getting into his stride and had wrung a standing ovation from the crowd for that most evocative of nostalgic show-stoppers, I Left My Heart in San Francisco. Then, as he basked in the applause, a mysterious smoky haze could be discerned rising at the back of the auditorium. Unfortunately this was not the mist that rolls dramatically off the Pacific to engulf the Golden Gate Bridge, but a conflagration in the bowels of the Albert Hall. Moments later we were invited to evacuate the building.
Hitherto, the Bennett show had been rolling along agreeably enough, even if the fabled entertainer had been sounding a little fluffy around the edges. Even if you can command a stage as effortlessly as most people boil an egg, holding the Albert Hall in the palm of your hand doesn't get any easier at the age of 75. There were passages when Bennett wandered off key, and interludes when the melody vanished altogether. His stab at Somewhere Over the Rainbow, with only Lee Musiker's piano for company, could be described as rickety. If this had been Pavarotti, the punters would have been chucking fruit and tin cans.
But Bennett was able to ride over the musical rough patches because his instinct for a phrase remains unimpaired; he still has the knack of delivering a lyric as though he had just bumped into you on the street and was topping you up on the latest gossip. He made brisk work of I Love a Piano ("I know a fine way to treat a Steinway. And with the pedal I love to meddle"), and survived the comical self-pity of Maybe This Time ("Everybody loves a winner but nobody loves me"). As he sped through All of Me and I Got Rhythm, guitarist Gray Sargent and saxophonist Scott Hamilton seized their moments to shine, and they handled Smile with a feathery lightness that verged on the supernatural. "I've been singin' 50 years!" Tony declared. "I was the Britney Spears of my day." She should be so lucky.
