For years, part of the mystique surrounding Barbra Streisand was the rarity of her public performances.
Those lucky enough to have seen her in smoky nightclubs in the early 1960s, when she was the gangly "kook" wearing thrift shop anti-couture, or to have caught her historic Central Park concert in 1967, when she was on the verge of her film career, could only dream about another live encounter with the Brooklyn-born "actress who sings" (her early self-description).
It wasn't until 1994 that Streisand, by then long accustomed to the tight control of the studio, tried out concert touring again, an event that seemed at the time positively cosmos-altering. Naturally, the tour was a triumph and, naturally, it was followed by others. Even after she gave what was advertised as her last public appearance in 2000 at New York's Madison Square Garden, she resumed touring in 2006.
On Tuesday, a document of that 2006 tour makes its first appearance as part of a three-disc DVD set, Streisand: The Concerts. The collection also includes, for the first time on DVD, the 1994 show from Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, which finds the singer in superb vocal shape through a mostly sure-proof sampling of her repertoire, and Putting It Together: The Making of the Broadway Album from 1990.
Those other items are treasurable souvenirs in their own right, but the big news here is the 2006 concert, nicely filmed in Fort Lauderdale with excellent sound. No serious Streisand fan will want to be without it.
From the first notes of the opening song, "Starting Here, Starting Now," the old magic is there. This is the kind of song Streisand was born to sing, as perfectly suited to the timbre and range as to her instinctive way of knowing how to climb a melodic line for maximum expressive reward.
To be sure, a somewhat husky quality emerges throughout the concert when she pumps up the volume. But the voice (she was 64 then) still sounds in remarkably firm shape, as articulate and pitch-sure as ever, and her phrasing almost always rings true.
In "Down With Love," she sounds delightfully free and easy, playing subtly with the tune as the familiar, brilliant Peter Matz arrangement snaps along underneath.
Another golden oldie, Ma Premiere Chanson, a bittersweet song from 1966 with a melody Streisand wrote, would have been more welcome had it not been accompanied with shtick. The introductory bit, where she first tries playing the song on the piano, seemed forced and clunky when I heard her do it at the tour-launching concert in Philadelphia, and it seems just as forced and clunky here.
