It opened with a standing ovation. And in a place the size of the 02 – the venue put on this earth to make Luton airport feel better – that’s impressive. It was that kind of evening: not so much Streisand in concert as an opportunity for worshippers at Barbra’s shrine to do a whole lot of basking in her genuinely unparalleled glory. Fifty years at the pinnacle of popular music is not to be sneezed at. That she can sing with a 60-piece orchestra and still deliver shiver-inducing money notes at the age of 71 is truly something. It is not, however, everything.
Her vocal power and idiosyncrasy, everywhere apparent throughout her explosive 1963 debut LP The Barbra Streisand Album, made when she was just 20, catapulted her to stardom, a state of being that (for good and ill) has never left her. What made her poleaxing, untrained sound so unique wasn’t just her astoundingly mature, expressive instrument, it was the ardour and sheer abandonment of her singing. She sang as if nothing else mattered. And in album after album (she has released around 50), the voice only got better. But around the end of the Seventies, she began to play safe.
We were treated to a loving home video made by her son Jason of him and his mother over the years
With rare exceptions – often when duetting, where competition spurred her on – everything sounded more and more controlled, as if she were marshalling her resources. That felt especially odd when she had long forsworn live performance because of stage fright. So when in 1994 she returned to live concerts after a break of, er, 27 years, it was no surprise that in concerts at Wembley and Madison Square Gardens she sounded similarly contained. The shock now is how often she now thrillingly drops that guard.
At the edges, the voice now sounds a little frayed. Ironically, however, that releases her from the self-imposed tyranny of being able to use her enviably liquid tone to achieve aural perfection. The croak that has crept in, and the greater effort she has to make, re-releases her wow factor and the more expressive gutsy quality. When she lets rip, that voice slices triumphantly through the years, even overriding a sound design so resonantly bombastic that it drowned the 100-strong finale chorus singing “Let Our Garden Grow” from Bernstein’s Candide.
You can, however, hear a “but” coming, can’t you? Let me fess up: as a young teen I didn’t just love her, I wanted to be her – though not a lot later I got a grip and realised I was merely gay. So it grieves me to report that much of the evening left me if not quite cold, then more than a little distant - and I sat close in one of the expensive seats (top price £471).
It wasn’t just that every lyric was on the autocue, so was every line of patter, every gag. Spontaneity was in depressingly short supply. We were being inducted into Barbraworld, a place that perspective forgot, with photo collages of young Streisand splashed onscreen around her. Then on came singing sister Rosyln Kind. And in the second half we were treated to a loving home video made by her son Jason of him and his mother over the years. Her overflowing pride in a son who, it turns out, can sing, is admirable but after duetting “How Deep Is The Ocean” with mom, did we need two solos from him? Watching cuteness from a 45-year old requires indulgence on a pretty major scale.
Which most of the audience, starved of Barbra in the flesh, was up for. Refreshingly, she largely chose to sing her favourite standards rather than regurgitating hits. A glowingly reflective “Nice’n’Easy” entirely escaped Sinatra’s shadow and Jimmy Webb’s “Didn’t We” simply soared. We revelled in a Jule Styne medley that brought a foretaste of her proposed movie-musical Gypsy and she still lifts audiences to their feet with her killer signature “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” But it was her other Styne anthem that gave the game away.
“People” isn’t lyricist Bob Merrill’s finest hour – what does “People who need people/Are the luckiest people in the world” actually mean? – but it deserves more than mid-phrase interruptions. Anyone who can break the build of a song to kibbitz with an audience – ”Front seats? You can stretch your legs, or have a nice lunch...” - is clearly not committed to expressing the song. And if she’s not fully engaged, why should we care?
Watch Barbra Streisand onstage at the O2 Arena