Barbra Streisand: Lazy Afternoon : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Streisand's first collaboration with producers Rupert Holmes and Jeffrey Lesser puts her back on the right track after last year's atrocious Butterfly. Holmes's skill as a composer/arranger of cinematic music complements Streisand's diva style perfectly on the album's best cuts.

John La Touche's "Lazy Afternoon," from the Fifties musical The Golden Apple, receives its definitive rendition—one in which Streisand's voice coils archly through a gorgeous, shimmering arrangement. Streisand's first original tune, "By the Way," with lyrics by Holmes, ranks with "The Way We Were," "Free Again," "People" and "Happy Days Are Here Again" as a classic Streisand big ballad production. Its dramatic melody suggests that Streisand is still most at home singing torch arias with her magnificent legato underscored by lavish orchestration and uninhibited by rhythm tracks. In such a setting Streisand vents a controlled hysteria—compounded of voracious longing, sadness and an iron will—whose emotional power I find simply devastating. Holmes's excellent love/hate song to movie fantasies, "Widescreen," is the album's third unqualified success. As sung by Streisand, who herself personifies moviegoers' fantasies, the song's mixture of sentiment and sarcasm seems doubly ironic.

Two other Holmes songs, "Letters that Cross in the Mail" and "My Father's Song," both well made and well performed, pale slightly in comparison to "Widescreen." A remake of the Four Tops hit, "Shake Me, Wake Me," makes a passable nod to disco, while Streisand's phrasings of the old torch song "Moanin' Low" and Stevie Wonder's "You and I" sound uncomfortably stilted.

The greatest theatrical singer of the past quarter-century, Streisand is one artist who not only withstands elaborate production but thrives on it. Lazy Afternoon suggests that Holmes and Lesser are the ideal team to continue the job.