BARBRA STREISAND: 'THIS IS THE MUSIC I LOVE. IT IS MY ROOTS'

By STEPHEN HOLDEN / NYT

November 10, 1985

Barbra Streisand, a singer whose recent attempts to keep up with pop music's changing trends have been artistically shaky, has just released what may be the album of a lifetime. ''Barbra Streisand - The Broadway Album'' contains 15 classic songs spanning more than half a century of musical theater, from ''Showboat'' to ''Sunday in the Park With George.'' Most were recorded with an old-time studio orchestra. ''The Broadway Album'' soars with full-bodied, tender bel canto renditions of ballads by Stephen Sondheim, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, and a ''Porgy and Bess'' medley that stand among the most thrilling performances of her 23-year recording career.

Miss Streisand's return to a style of music she abandoned 15 years ago as uncommercial is a career coup that has surprised Columbia Records by having netted 800,000 advance orders for the album. It is also something of a historic milestone in that Miss Streisand persuaded Stephen Sondheim, who is represented by six songs (eight counting two lyrics from ''West Side Story''), to rewrite three songs for the project, including ''Send in the Clowns.''

In a rare interview last week, Miss Streisand, who was in New York to make a video for the song ''Somewhere'' (from ''West Side Story''), talked about her career in show business and the high price of her legendary perfectionism.

''Making 'Yentl' wiped me out and left me with no drive for two years,'' she lamented. ''But once I commit to a project, whether it's a record or a movie, I become so involved with every aspect that I become obsessed. It's both a blessing and a curse, because I'm incapable of turning it off at 7 o'clock every night.'' Miss Streisand is presently gearing up for two future film projects. This February, she will begin shooting on ''Nuts,'' a serious drama based on Tom Topor's Broadway play. Beyond that looms a larger unnamed musical film, which she will direct, and that will be made in collaboration with her close friends, the lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman and a composer yet to be determined.

''The Broadway Album'' (Columbia OC 40092 disk, also on cassette and CD) is an obvious labor of love in a recording career that has seen the singer frequently go against her own tastes, sometimes embarrassing herself in an effort to accommodate pop trends.

''I really can't stand listening to pop music, although I know I should,'' the singer admitted. ''I don't even keep in close touch with Broadway anymore. The last shows I've seen have been very disappointing. In fact, most of the time I don't listen to any music. When I do, it's classical. My favorite piece is Mahler's Tenth Symphony, and I also love Bartok's Second Violin Concerto and Maria Callas singing Puccini.''

Although she has recorded dozens of songs using rock rhythm sections, Miss Streisand still feels out of her element singing music with a strong, regular backbeat.

''Because I am a singer who believes in the moment, I do each take of a song differently,'' she said. ''You can't do that with rock and roll because everyone says that you have to sing on the beat, and that's very hard for me.''

Until this album, Miss Streisand had never sung ''Send in the Clowns,'' one of the most performed theater songs of modern times, because she didn't understand the words.

''I am a singing actress who likes to create little dramas,'' she said. ''And as an actress I didn't understand the last line, 'Well, maybe next year,' so I asked Steve how he would feel if I ended it with the line, 'Don't bother, they're here.' I didn't know how he would react, but he was so cute. He said a lot of people had asked him what the song meant - now they would understand it.''

Mr. Sondheim not only changed the last line but added a brand-new eight-line second bridge that gives the song a psychological autonomy that separates this version once and for all from the plot of the musical. The new lyrics also clarify the song's depiction of romantic bad timing:

What a surprise!

Who could foresee

I'd come to feel about you What you felt about me?

Why only now when I see

That you've drifted away? What a surprise . . . What a cliche.* Both Miss Streisand and Mr. Sondheim look back on their collaboration, which began last March on the telephone and continued over the summer in a Los Angeles recording studio, with good feelings.

''I had been thinking about doing an album of Broadway songs for years,'' Miss Streisand said. ''When I finally got around to it, I called up Steve and said I was interested in doing some of his songs. We hardly knew each other, and I had only recorded one of his songs, 'There Won't Be Trumpets,' which ended up not being released. It turned into a process that was so exhilarating, there were moments I was screaming with joy over the phone.''

The revised ''Send in the Clowns'' will not supersede the original version in future productions of ''A Little Night Music.'' ''It's a self-sufficient song,'' Mr. Sondheim commented. ''The last eight bars weren't written as a chorus but as a reprise. In the show, something happens between the first chorus and that reprise to give the character an entire change of attitude, and that's what confused Barbra.

''I'm absolutely stunned that the song has become such a standard, because it was always meant as a throwaway - a little song for a little voice,'' Mr. Sondheim reflected. ''Even two years after it was written, nobody had paid any attention to it except Bobby Short. Then Judy Collins picked it up and then Frank Sinatra. It was a lucky concatenation of circumstances.''

Another revised Sondheim song, ''Putting It Together,'' opens ''The Broadway Album.'' This patter song from ''Sunday in the Park With George'' talks cynically about the mixture of inspiration and commercial wheeling and dealing that go into a laser artist's successful career. Mr. Sondheim re-wrote the lyric for Miss Streisand so that it is now about the record industry, not the art world. Instead of ''Lasers are expensive,'' she sings ''Vinyl is expensive,'' and the verses substitute musical references for visual ones, with the song building to a witty new ending that brings in ''beats, sheets, tracks, charts, and reels.''

Mr. Sondheim's third important lyrical contribution was written for a medley of ''Pretty Women'' (from ''Sweeney Todd'') and ''The Ladies Who Lunch,'' (from ''Company'').

''I wanted to put the two songs together, because I loved the melody of 'Pretty Women' but didn't feel comfortable singing from a male point of view,'' Miss Streisand said. ''When I listened to 'The Ladies Who Lunch,' I thought it would be interesting to put the songs together to present two opposing views of women - a superficial view versus what their lives might really be like - but I needed a lyrical ending that would pull the two together.''

Mr. Sondheim obliged with a coda that succeeds in turning ''The Ladies Who Lunch'' into ''Pretty Women,'' both lyrically and musically.

Obviously, the composer wouldn't perform such custom tailoring for just anyone. ''Barbra Streisand has one of the two or three best voices in the world of singing songs,'' Mr. Sondheim observed. ''It's not just her voice but her intensity, her passion and control. She has the meticulous attention to detail that makes a good artist. Frank Sinatra and Barbara Cook are the same way. Although every moment has been thought out, you don't see all the sweat and decisions that went into the work. It as as though they just stepped out of the shower and began singing at you.''

Several songs on ''The Broadway Album'' reunite Miss Streisand with Peter Matz, her longtime arranger-conductor from pre-rock days. The best is an exquisitely tender ''Can't Help Lovin' That Man,'' in which Stevie Wonder plays the harmonica. Mr. Matz also arranged and conducted the ''Pretty Women/Ladies Who Lunch'' medley, which Miss Streisand sings with a bold, almost accusatory harshness. By contrast, her readings of ''If I Loved You'' and ''I Loves You Porgy'' shimmer with a delicate ethereality that also suffuses a medley of ''I Have Dreamed,'' ''We Kiss in a Shadow'' and ''Something Wonderful,'' from ''The King and I.''

The album's lavish orchestral arrangements coexist comfortably beside a more contemporary setting of ''Something's Coming'' that would not be out of place on a Michael Jackson album, and a version of ''Somewhere,'' set (according to Miss Streisand) ''in outer space,'' that wraps the singer's heavily echoed voice in sheets of electronic twinkles: ''West Side Story'' meets ''E.T.''

A fundamental contradiction in the Streisand personality is that even while finding endless faults in past accomplishments, she has never been afraid to forge ahead and take huge risks.

''Musically, I've felt compelled to try everything,'' she said. ''The most difficult singing project was my classical album, because classical singing is such a disciplined art form. As in rock, the rhythms are very specific.'' Miss Streisand, who, amazingly, doesn't read music, learned the classical lieder by listening to other singers' recordings.

''I wanted to write 'This is a work in progress' on the back of 'Classical Barbra,' but my record company asked me not to,'' Miss Streisand said. ''But even though I'm not satisfied with it, I'm still happy I made it.''

The singer's perfectionism, however, often makes it hard for her to appreciate past accomplishments. ''I can't bear to listen to my records until about 10 years after they're out, and then when I do, it's usually agonizing,'' she said. ''All I hear are the flaws, the things I could have done better. An exception is 'Lazy Afternoon,' which I made with Rupert Holmes. I love that albuum. But while I was working on 'The Broadway Album,' I went back and listened to my first two records, and I just cringed listening to some of the performances. Although I had a purer reed-like sound in those days, I think my singing then was often overly dramatic and screechy.''

Miss Streisand said she has never had clear-cut artistic role models. ''The person I admired most growing up was Marlon Brando, but I never had any musical idols,'' she said. ''My favorite singer while I was growing up was Johnny Mathis. I also listened a lot to Joni James records and sang her hit, 'Have You Heard,' at club auditions, but I didn't really want to sound like her. At my first Broadway audition, I sang 'The Tennessee Waltz' instead of a show tune.

''My life is better now than it has ever been,'' Miss Streisand reflected. ''I appreciate things more and feel more grateful for what I have. One thing I've never done is pay attention to my voice. I've never pampered it or thought about it. It just served me. Now I realize I'm at an age when it's not automatically going to serve me for much longer. I've made all these records - 38 all told. What I want to do now is cut down on recording because it takes so much out of me. I'd rather direct and act in more films. I'd like to do concerts again someday, but I suffer from terrible stage fright. I didn't used to have it, but as I've gotten older it has gotten worse and worse.''

If ''The Broadway Album'' is a big commercial success, it could lead to more old-style records of standards and possibly to a sustained renaissance in a recording career that still takes a back seat to the movies.

''One reason I made 'The Broadway Album' is that I felt I had to stop recording songs that any number of other people could sing as well if not better than I could,'' Miss Streisand reflected. ''It was time for me to do something I truly believed in. This is the music I love, it is where I came from, it is my roots.''

*Copyright 1973, 1985 Revelation Music Publishing Corp., and Rilting Music, Inc. (Ascap), a Tommy Valando Publication.

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