Barbra Streisand
The Movie Album

Posted on Barbra Streisand's Official Web Site
2 November 2003

IN SUM: The album's true beauties lie in its ability to allow us to re-experience the tonal and mood structures of the original movies and revisit them with a fresh, new perspective.

BARBRA Streisand has succeeded in producing a rare “motion picture soundtrack” in The Movie Album, one of the most consistently polished of her sixty albums. Its true beauties lie in its ability to allow us to re-experience the tonal and mood structures of the original movies and revisit them with a fresh, new perspective.

Those who expect bombastic vocal performances in the theatrical sense of Barbra's Broadway albums may be disappointed, as there are little of them here. Film music, after all, has more to do with sounds and the emotional effects needed for the movies they were written for and little to do with “acting” the dialogue (unless it were a musical). And Barbra's vocals, still peerless in majesty of sound, concatenate effortlessly with the solo instruments and all the other sounds of the 75-piece orchestra to deliver that lush, cinematic direction. The last time we heard such impeccable compatibility of sound values was in The Broadway Album eighteen years ago. (This is why Barbra should stick to having one producer per album. Happily, she does so to herself in The Movie Album.)

It must have been difficult for Barbra, who has always believed in truthfulness in her art, to initially approach the music in this album when played away from the source and from a musical perspective, and harder still to evoke the cinematic emotional responses. Perhaps this is why it took her seventeen years to complete the vision. And in the end, the product is a paradigm of intelligent artistry: The Movie Album belongs to the must-have collection of fans of movies and their music.