The still inimitable Barbra Streisand

Record Review: What Matters Most

MANILA, Philippines - When Barbra Streisand cut her first album in 1963, nobody could have predicted how far she would go or how long she would last. For it was the year of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan; and the then nightclub singer with a quirky face was singing the songs of Harold Arlen — an anachronism purveying an anachronism.

Some 50 years later, Streisand, her voice raspier but still mellifluously expressive when she wants it to be, cuts her 64th album, titled What Matters Most, at a time when the airwaves are dominated by the likes of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé and Jay-Z and Kanye West. And she is still inimitably herself, a unicorn among lions, as somebody said of another inimitable woman, Edith Sitwell. That fact alone is remarkable, but Streisand’s new album is more than a curiosity and deserves a listen for reasons intrinsic to it.

What Matters Most is a tribute album to Streisand’s longtime friends Alan and Marilyn Bergman. As such, the lyrics to all of the 10 songs in it were written by the Bergmans. This shouldn’t be a surprise, for Streisand had previously recorded more than 50 of their lyrics. In fact, the words of some of her most memorable songs, including The Way We Were, You Don’t Bring Me Flowers and Papa, Can You Hear Me? were by the Bergmans. This album bids fair to increase the number of Streisand’s signature songs.

None of the songs in the album is new. Like Streisand’s maiden output in 1963, this is an “all-covers” album. It is a paradox of sorts that a woman who has pushed the envelope so many times as Streisand should retreat to the tried-and-tested, the familiar. But one of Streisand’s gifts is the ability to breathe new life to old tunes. One remembers that her very first single Happy Days Are Here Again had been the anthem celebrating the end of the Prohibition in 1929 before she turned it, in her first album, into a bitter commentary on the signs of the times, the long last note a primal scream.

As such, she is an interpreter and in What Matters Most, puts her skills in full display. Her take on the oft-covered The Windmills of Your Mind is arguably definitive. Streisand singing Michel Legrand has ever been Streisand at her most incandescent; and in this recording the slight catch in the voice here, the inflection on a word there, the subtle shift in tempo illumine the kaleidoscope of meanings in Legrand’s mesmerizing melody and the Bergmans’ equally psychedelic lyrics.

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The other Legrand composition in the album, Something New in My Life, was made popular by Stephen Bishop years ago. Streisand estranges — and so makes new — the song by singing an additional verse but more so by the way she colors the familiar lines. Compare the way she sings “I knew the moment that you touched me,/you touched me” with the original’s. Simply by varying the tempo at the second “you touched me,” she makes what could be taken as padding signify.

The actress in Streisand shines in The Same Hello, The Same Goodbye, composed by John Williams, and I’ll Never Say Goodbye, written for the movie The Promise by David Shire. Those who want their Streisand grand and dramatic will find much to relish here.

Streisand gets some help from Chris Botti in two songs, Nice ’n’ Easy, made popular by Frank Sinatra, and Alone in the World. Voice and trumpet are bouncy in one and languorous in the other, perfectly blended in both. The other songs of interest are the bossa nova sounding So Many Stars, composed by Sergio Mendes, which has Streisand singing a few bars in Portuguese, and That Face, the closest she’s gotten to swing.

It is unlikely that What Matters Most will produce converts among the young for Streisand. By contemporary standards, it is a soporific album, too lushly orchestrated, too schmaltzy, too slow, and well, too “old,” not for it to be written off. That it should be so is a shame. For What Matters Most reminds those that would listen of what should matter most in an industry too often blinded by fads and flashes in the pan.