The Barbra Streisand Album

Barbra Streisand’s debut album in 1963 could have been called Spotlight on Barbra Streisand. On the cover, she is photographed close up with a spotlight above her. "Am I out of spotlight?" she asks on a contemporaneous Bon Soir recording. This album cover tells her she is not—and tells us she would not be for a very long time.

Harold Arlen's liner notes on the album are eerily preordaining: “Watch out for her. And remember, I told you so.”

Barbra Joan Streisand

This 1971 album is what happens when a record producer with strength of vision and conviction takes the helm. Under Richard Perry's impeccable direction, Ms Streisand brings theatrical élan to songs written by her contemporaries: Burt Bacharach, Carole King, John Lennon, Laura Nyro, Steely Dan. The performances, wrapped in Mr Perry's consistent production values, sound as fresh today as they did in the early seventies.

The Broadway Album

In 1985, after a 15-year foray into radio-friendly pop music, Ms Streisand returned to her musical roots and released what is universally acclaimed as her finest album to date. The Broadway Album is a leap of faith: at a time when theater music was considered non-commercial, Ms Streisand went against grain, chose 16 brilliant songs from the Broadway musical, and sang from the heart. The album went on to thrill millions of listeners with a superbly polished production and a voice at its peak, become the number one album in early 1986, earn a Grammy nomination for album of the year, and win for Ms Streisand the Grammy award for the year's best pop vocal performance by a female.

The Movie Album

This 2003 output is the cinematic companion piece to The Broadway Album. It must have been difficult for Ms Streisand, who has always believed in truthfulness in her art, to initially approach the music in The Movie 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.