How Great a Singer Is Barbra Streisand? Just Check Out Our Playlist!

Mar. 15, 2025

Barbra Streisand in her Oscar-winning performance in ‘Funny Girl’ in 1968.Photo:Silver Screen Collection/Getty

Silver Screen Collection/Getty

But the music—the singing—has arguably been the anchor of her career, and perhaps her greatest gift to the world. The classical pianist Glenn Gould wrote that “the Streisand voice is one of the natural wonders of the age, an instrument of infinite diversity and timbral resource.” It can be supple, thundering, mellow, sinuous, brassy, rounded, gorgeous.

Streisand has a number of signature classics (“People,” “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” “The Way We Were,” “Guilty”), but her taste and talent have been adventurous and, for the most part, deeply edifying. She’s one of the rare artists who makes you want to both stand in awe and melt into a puddle. This, you can imagine, is hard to do at the same time.

Here’s a playlist that will let you sample the many moods, and modes, of Streisand.

“Miss Marmelstein” (1962)

Streisand was only 19 when she appeared on Broadway in the musicalI Can Get It for You Wholesale— and stopped the show with this number, the comic romantic lament of an unmarried secretary. The humor, the surprising way of shaping  a lyric and the soaring, swooping vocal pyrotechnics were already in place. She followed this with the stage production ofFunny Girl,and after that she was off to Hollywood. What was she going to do, wait around to play Miss Hannigan inAnnie?Although she did record a bossa-nova-tinged version of that show’s big hit, “Tomorrow.”

“Napoleon” (1962)

“Mother” (1971)

Six years afterBob Dylanwent electric at Newport, Streisand went pop-rock with two albums in one year,Stony EndandBarbra Joan Streisand.(Why hasn’t an enterprising music journalist tried to make sense of the connection between these seismic events?) Both albums show Streisand’s strong-willed determination to move beyond show tunes and the American Songbook — proving to the world,  she writes, that “Icouldchange with the times.”Barbra Joanincludes her oddly memorable cover of “Mother,”John Lennon’s cathartic wail about the traumas of his childhood. Streisand isn’t one to wail: She forges through this psychodrama with sheer lung power and piercing high notes.  Lennon moves you to pity, Streisand to submission.

“Simple Man” (1974)

“Lazy Afternoon” (1975)

“Auf dem Wasser zu singen” (1976)

“Woman in Love” (1980)

Improbable as it might seem, or maybe it’s not improbable at all, one of Streisand’s very best albums isGuilty,a pop-disco collaboration with Barry Gibb. You won’t necessarily want to dance to it, but the music throughout has a definite groove — a shimmering energy — and Streisand’s voice is extraordinarily supple. On the lush, brooding “Woman in Love,” she rides on waves of melody, soaring and cresting, soaring and cresting. It’s flawless, fabulous. And yet, Streisand writes, she resisted the song because she couldn’t make sense of Gibb’s rather vague lyrics. In the end, though, “I thought,F— it. Forget the words. Just do it.”

“No Wonder” fromYentl(1983)

“Tell Him” with Celine Dion (1997)

Well: At the 1997 Academy Awards ceremony, Natalie Cole was expected to perform “I Finally Found Someone,” the theme from Streisand’sThe Mirror Has Two Faces.“Someone” itself was a Streisand duet with Bryan Adams, and she and Adams were both nominees for writing it, but she was too nervous to perform the number on stage. Cole, however, bowed out of the broadcast because of illness, and Dion was recruited to sing instead. Streisand was seated in the audience, enjoying the moment when Michael Kidd, choreographer of her 1969 filmHello Dolly, was receiving an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. Then, she writers, “I suddenly started hemorrhaging. (I was having more problems with endometriosis.) I quickly got up and rushed to the bathroom.” She missed Dion’s performance as a result,  but afterward apologized and told her: “We have to find a song to sing together.”

And so we have “Tell Him.” Dion kicks it off, singing with trembling innocence about a romantic crisis, then Streisand enters, taking on the role of a wiser, stronger woman more experienced in such messes — a doyenne of love. The song is melodic but also a bit histrionic. It sounds as if it could be sung in Italian through microphones. But, long story short, the harmonies of these two superstars are irresistible.

“Carefully Taught/Children Will Listen” (2006)

And that’s just the tip of the Streisberg.

source: people.com