Grammys 2015: Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett finally hit the right note

Here’s something I didn’t expect the Grammy Awards to make me say: I wish I’d caught Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett’s post-ceremony gig at the Wiltern on Sunday night.

Five months ago, when these two released their “Cheek to Cheek� album, I’d have dreaded seeing them do anything onstage together. The record is terrible, perhaps 2014’s worst, with frightfully dull renditions of standards like “Anything Goes� and “I Won’t Dance� that illuminate nothing beyond Lady Gaga’s desperate bid for respect after the perceived failure of her previous record, “Artpop.�

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As I wrote at the time (and still believe), “Cheek to Cheek� is pure exploitation, not only of Bennett’s reputation but of our faith in Gaga’s much-trumpeted commitment to artistic expression. An appealingly perverse idea on paper, the Gaga-Bennett pairing turned out in reality to be a cynical bait-and-switch.

But something evidently happened between then and Sunday night, because on the Grammys stage — where they performed not long after beating Barbra Streisand for the traditional pop vocal album prize — the singers put more energy into a performance of their album’s Irving Berlin-penned title track than they did into the entirety of “Cheek to Cheek.�

Were we simply seeing the animating effect of a live audience? Yeah, sure. That’s partly why, elsewhere in Sunday’s show, Annie Lennox did “I Put a Spell on You� with so much more intensity than she does on her recent standards album, “Nostalgia.�

More important, though, Gaga appeared finally to have found room for herself in this music. Spilling out of a low-cut jeweled gown, she was lusty and funny — delightfully vulgar, really — in a way that wasn’t so different from the infamous vomit-splashed performance she gave last year at the South by Southwest music festival.

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She sounded great too, harmonizing easily with Bennett over the sturdy swing of a four-piece jazz combo. But the quality of her vocal was secondary to the newfound (or rediscovered) confidence she was putting across — a dramatic shift from “Cheek to Cheek,� where the overriding sensation was fear.

At Grammy rehearsals last week, Bennett told my colleague Randy Lewis that he and Gaga are preparing to record a second album together, this one with songs by Cole Porter, whose work can happily withstand even more vulgarity than Berlin’s.

After Sunday’s surprising display — and whatever I sadly missed at the Wiltern — I’m excited to hear it.

Twitter: @mikaelwood