Album Review: Love Is The Answer by Barbra Streisand

Even before their first session together, Barbra Streisand and collaborator Diana Krall designed Love Is the Answer as a deeply emotional record: "each song an exploration concerning matters of the heart. " And with the arrangements of maestro Johnny Mandel simply drawing occasional shading around Streisand's expressive voice -- and often leaving her voice as the only instrument -- the album goes well beyond the usual saloon-song tropes to become a heart-wrenching experience with virtually every song. Additionally, although much was made of the collaboration, Krall's piano stays in the background, and Streisand's is the only voice heard.

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Barbra Streisand, the grande dame at 67, has no use for future-disco and NC-17 rappers. Her album of languid, impeccably arranged standards, Love Is the Answer, seems swathed in champagne bubbles and black velvet, be it a sluicing, string-laden bossa nova (”Gentle Rain”) or a Sinatra standby (”In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning”). Not exactly galvanizing stuff, but the woman still sings like buttah.

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What's Barbra Streisand doing on this page, you may ask? Sharing her first ­full-length studio session in four years with jazz singer/pianist Diana Krall's quartet; Krall is also handling the ­production duties. Streisand is even due this week at New York's 120-seater Village Vanguard jazz club, where she hasn't performed since opening for Miles Davis there nearly 50 years ago. She might acquire the lustre of a ­little late-career jazz cool from this ­association, and her delivery of this set of well-travelled standard love songs is as accomplished as might be expected from a diva who didn't sell 140m ­albums and win a skipload of Grammys for nothing.

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