This review offers a two-part impression about Lady Gaga’s April 12, 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival performance as well as Mayhem, her latest album (Interscope Records, 2025) - written from the perspective of a classical musician.
The consecutive weekends of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at sprawling Empire Polo Club grounds in Indio are over (April 11-13 and April 18-20). As usual, it’s an event filled with a huge lineup of diverse artists and groups that perform on stages throughout the venue – as well as on the Coachella website YouTube Livestream, where these impressions were browsed. The festival is a one of a kind happening where onstage thumping, prancing, rapping, improvising, vocalizing, blaring, sweet talking and singing musical moments seem to send packed audiences into a frenzy of exhilaration – even in toasty weather.
Coachella is all about star power, and this year it shimmered with headliners like Lady Gaga, the metallic-rock trio Green Day, Post Malone, Travis Scott and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel, a first time appearance of a major orchestra. Dudamel and orchestra spun some familiar and crossover repertoire that featured high-profile guests like Laufey, Becky G, Zedd and Ca7riel with Paco Amoroso. It was a great fit for aficionados or newcomers to classical music. But then there was Lady Gaga, née Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, originally from Manhattan, New York City - the diva of pop.
Watching Lady Gaga’s nearly two hour extravaganza on April 12 that ended around 1:00 am conjured up the 19th century buzz word Gesamtkunstwerk that combines an essence of music, drama and dance. While there are other creative artists associated with genres such as rap, hip hop, rock and blues, Lady Gaga’s Coachella show embraces a total art concept of nuanced singing, movement, couture and visuals that contain nouvelle and twisted elements reminiscent of a Gothic opera. A giant onstage screen listed titles of the four act production and what unfolded was an onstage fantasy of the macabre and sublime.
Each set was peppered with outstanding background musicians, gloomy atmospheric lighting, dancing sequences, a dream-like pas de deux between Lady Gaga and gaunt skeletons, a grounded chess board with human players – all infused with her energized, pitch perfect singing (with occasional resonant screams), muscular swing and brisk catwalks past a rapturous crowd, a sweet at the piano interlude and outrageously designed clothing changes (evoking off-center images of Macbeth, Cinderella and Valkyries). Heartfelt verbal interaction with an ecstatic crowd waving arms, iPhones or engaging in a sing-along is another reason why Lady Gaga is one of the most dynamic performers and influencers of our time.
In July-December, Lady Gaga will embark on The Mayhem Ball tour in support of a newly released Mayhem album, as was the case with other recordings like The Monster Ball Tour, The Chromatica Ball Tour and Cheek to Cheek Tour with the late, great Tony Bennett. Over the past twenty years, her career as artist and actress has received the highest accolades for creativity and awards such as Golden Globes, Grammys and an Academy Award for Best Original Song Shallow for the film A Star is Born. Her latest magnum opus, Mayhem embraces and defies tradition.
The album’s theme is reflected in titles of the fourteen tracks which read like a romp through Dante’s The Divine Comedy; the music contains a totally innovative mixture of harmonic consonance and dissonance with lyrics wrapped in dotted rhythmic patterns as in Kill For Love. Stylistically, these signature elements define the orchestration of her work and highlight a vocal timbre which flows with a range of dark, bright, lyrical tones, delivered with an essence of melodic and metric flexibility.
She brings a soaring resonance to Don’t Call Tonight, Blade of Grass and Die With a Smile, a classic retro-rock style ballad with Bruno Mars - the heldentenor of pop. Many of the songs are written in collaboration with Michael Polansky, her significant other, and Gesaffelstein on Killah. All selections feature atmospheric backup vocals, blended drumming and sophisticated acoustic mixing that capture the mellow aspects of Lady Gaga’s tone in Abracadabra, Perfect Celebrity and Vanish Into You, where smooth and bouncy rhythms create brilliant effects. The Beast has the tinge of a new age tone poem that Lady Gaga draws out with sweeping sound and LoveDrug is infused with an inflection of lower voice richness.
Mayhem seems to be another artistic project by Lady Gaga destined for awards. The only thing missing is the visual element of her performance – so for the full picture listen to her Coachella 2025 gig on YouTube or attend The Mayhem Ball tour from July 16 to December 13 in cities that include Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York City, London, Paris and Sydney.
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