Evergreen: Music from the Films of Barbra Streisand: (Compilation) The existence of this album in the Sonic Images archives can't help but remind you of moderate Republican presidential candidates making speeches to Evangelical conventions. It would perhaps be easier for the moderate Republican to sell his mainstream platform to the religious right than it would be for record producer Ford A. Thaxton to market this Barbra Streisand compilation to film score collectors. But those collectors obviously weren't the intended audience for this product; it was an attempt by Sonic Images to use a marketable name to make a quick buck, and you can't blame them for trying. That doesn't mean that "Evergreen: Music from the Films of Barbra Streisand" will appeal to anyone who reads any of the other reviews at Filmtracks, though. Like previous compilations by the Sonic Images label, this album features re-recordings that celebrate the career of a popular mainstream artist, and this time, the tribute goes to the highly polarizing Streisand. With representations of songs and themes from films she directed, produced, starred in, and performed for, the compilation doesn't provide what it needed to into order to truly make the big money: Streisand's voice. Not meant to compete with her countless dozens of albums through the years, though, this compilation album, with a few notable exceptions, contains all the most famous of these works. Offered are non-vocal, instrumental performances by veteran musicians from the City of Prague Philharmonic, the Orchestra of the Americas, John Beal and the Symphonic Assembly, and le Grand Orchestre Symphonique. On the whole, the performances range from those that are "true to the original" to those that have a bit of artistic liberty applied to them, and your enjoyment of each of the nine selections will likely hinge on your appreciation of the individual original scores.
"She is one of the top performers of the second half of this century; one of the most recognizable figures in the entertainment community who has succeeded in riding the crest of success despite changing public taste; a woman whose talent extends beyond the field in which she originally trained, singing, to other areas, such as screenwriting, directing, composing and acting. Barbra Streisand achieved worldwide renown as a singer by bucking a trend at a time when pop music was fast being displaced by rock and roll; a genre she sometimes acknowledged but never adopted. In the same way that there only was one Mae West or one Judy Garland, in the pantheon of great entertainers there is only one Barbra."