Barbra Streisand

With her highly resonant and sophisticated vocal prowess, charismatic personality, and strongly independent spirit, Barbra Streisand rose to fame as one of the most creatively and commercially successful performers of her lifetime.

Recorded in November 1962, this album marks the first official release of the legendary Greenwich Village Nightclub shows and includes 24 newly mixed performances from the original master tapes in Barbra’s personal collection. With the release of this album, Columbia Records celebrates 60 years of making records with Barbra Streisand, the artist with the longest continuous catalog on the label and the only artist - male or female - on any label to chart #1 albums in every decade since the 1960s.

Billed as both a Barbra Streisand album and as an original motion picture soundtrack, Yentl contains the songs, sung by Streisand and written by Michel Legrand and Alan and Marilyn Bergman, that the character played by Streisand sings as internal monologues in the film, sometimes with spoken dialogue interspersed. (The album is filled out by "studio versions" of two of the songs, "The Way He Makes Me Feel" and "No Matter What Happens," played on contemporary electronic instruments, rather than in the orchestral settings used for the rest of the songs.) With such a thematic base, the music has an unusual consistency, and written specifically for Streisand, it makes use of her emotional expressiveness, phrasing, and timing as a singer. But it was also written as a complement to the film and on its own comes across as a group of isolated musical plot highlights rather than as a coherent song cycle. (Yentl won an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score.)