Barbra Streisand
's fourth live album was the only one to be drawn from a concert tour and not a one-time occasion, but it is no less special for that. For her first tour in 28 years,
Streisand
didn't just come out and sing her greatest hits for an hour-and-a-half. Instead, she wove a selection of her best-known songs together with what she considered career highlights and added new and special material, starting with the customized lyrics of
"As If We Never Said Goodbye"
and
"I'm Still Here,"
and including
"Ordinary Miracles,"
by her conductor,
Marvin Hamlisch
and her house lyricists,
Alan
Marilyn Bergman
. The show was a musical autobiography crafted (as her 1991 boxed set
Just for the Record
had been) for fans who would catch the references and agree with the artist on her viewpoints about her life, her career, the entertainment business, and politics. (And it was an abridged resume -- rockers like
"Stoney End"
and disco hits like
"Enough Is Enough"
were omitted.) There was no denying that the 52-year-old singer, backed by a large orchestra and singing the songs that had kept her at the forefront of popular music for 30 years, was an impressive concert performer. But
insisted that her listeners also encounter everything from her film directing ambitions to her psychoanalyst which made this an idiosyncratic performance from an artist determined to make public art out of her private story. As a result,
The Concert
may not be the place for neophytes to be introduced to her, though for fans it was the culmination of decades of wishing. ~ William Ruhlmann