Thanks for sending this very interesting article. This is what's great about
this list. :)
Nance
From: ourplace-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ourplace-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Vickie
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2016 12:20 PM
To: Our Place List <ourplace@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [ourplace] Barbara Streisand and Adele
Songbirds of a feather: Barbra Streisand and Adele make an indelible pop
diva match, yet they've never been onstage together
A star was reborn when Adele entered the world in 1988, nearly half a
century after the birth of the groundbreaking pop diva whose fading
tradition Adele upholds more convincingly than any young singer in her
generation.
We speak, of course, of Barbra Streisand.
Storytelling instincts, superhuman pipes, refined taste in glittering gowns:
These women share so much in common, yet they've never performed together in
public -- and not because Streisand refuses to make room in the spotlight.
Next month she'll put out her second duets album in two years, common-enough
projects for an artist at her age and with her wide assortment of friends
and admirers.
The two will come close to breathing the same air this week when they play
separate concerts at Staples Center in Los Angeles. On Tuesday, Streisand is
due to begin a North American tour ahead of the Aug. 26 release of "Encore:
Movie Partners Sing Broadway," which follows 2014's "Partners" and finds the
74-year-old entertainer performing numbers from musicals like "A Chorus
Line" and "Annie Get Your Gun" with help from actors including Hugh Jackman
and Melissa McCarthy.
Then Adele, 28, will take over the downtown arena for an unprecedented
eight-night stand that starts Friday, part of the British singer's lengthy
world tour behind last year's blockbuster "25" album.
The shows' proximity provides an opportunity to consider all that unites
Streisand and Adele. But the concerts' setting at one of modern pop's prime
destinations -- the spot where Taylor Swift touched down a year ago for five
gigs full of sly pomp and expert flash -- also invites us to think about the
ways pop diva-dom has changed over the decades since Streisand achieved
superstardom and to what extent Adele's huge success is a result of her
return to an earlier sensibility.
There have been previous near misses between the women (and Columbia Records
label mates) whose eventual collaboration seems like a show-business must.
For her 2011 album, "21," Adele recorded an elegant, bossa-nova-style
rendition of the Cure's "Lovesong" that had originally been devised for
Streisand.
And both artists sang at the Academy Awards in 2013, after which they were
photographed together at the Governors Ball, Adele looking like she'd won a
prize more special than the Oscar she was holding.
As they demonstrated that evening, what connects the singers most
immediately is the raw vocal ability that puts them in the smallest of
classes, especially now that vocal ability has become more of a
technological construct -- an after-the-fact product of careful digital
manipulation -- than something related to human physiology.
Listen if you haven't in a while to one of Streisand's signature tunes,
"People," from the musical "Funny Girl," and pay attention to the effortless
way she scales the tricky ascending melodic line -- it could stir a dead
man.
Now cue up "All I Ask," a stunning ballad from "25" in which Adele expertly
navigates a key change that seems, after the song has already pillaged your
heart, to open a whole new realm of romantic desperation. In both cases the
women are using their extraordinary voices to deliver extraordinary
emotions, and they're doing it in songs that seem expressly built for that
purpose.
Adele isn't the only young singer who can belt at a moment when that
particular skill is as irrelevant to the job as it's ever been. Ariana
Grande, for one, has proven herself a true vocal powerhouse -- and a far
bigger musical-theater nut than Adele.
But most current pop treats the voice as merely part of a busy sonic
landscape. On Streisand's old records -- even on her recent ones -- singing
is the raison d'etre, a prioritization that clearly extends through Adele's
relatively uncluttered work.
Which isn't to say that both women aren't attuned to shifts in popular
taste. After years singing show tunes, Streisand dabbled in rock and soul
throughout the '70s and later went disco (most memorably in "Guilty," her
gossamer duet with Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees).
And between all the stripped-down confessionals, "25" features a
collaboration with Swift's go-to writer-producer, Max Martin, and a track
streaked with the '80s-R&B textures in vogue among the likes of Haim and the
Weeknd.
Even when they're bending toward the mainstream, though, the singers still
sound rooted in their own distinct environments -- something that separates
them from, say, Rihanna, a model of portability capable of beaming herself
into a Calvin Harris song with little to no friction. Hearing Adele's voice,
in contrast, means plugging instantly into her matrix.
And it's those stubbornly resistant personas that really bind her and
Streisand, both of whom put across a powerful combination of approachability
and magnificence, both totally relatable and deeply unknowable at once.
"When #Adele came over to the house, she was so funny and down to earth,"
Streisand wrote on Instagram when she posted that Governors Ball photo of
the two of them. "My kind of gal!"
Obviously, the aw-shucks routine is a performance, as indeed it was when
Adele told a packed Radio City Music Hall in her recent NBC concert special
that she'd been so nervous before show time that she'd started searching for
an escape route.
You can think of the titles of each woman's first three albums in a similar
fashion: "The Barbra Streisand Album," "The Second Barbra Streisand Album"
and "The Third Album," along with "19," "21" and "25," each of which
advertises Adele's age when she wrote the record. Looked at one way, the
titles are doing away with superfluous pageantry; viewed another, they're
taking for granted the significance of the progression each series
describes.
Still, compared with the infallibility projected by other members of pop's
reigning elite -- "Take it to another level/ No passengers on my plane,"
Beyonce sings in her 2008 song "Diva" -- this kind of plain talk feels
refreshingly old-fashioned, a welcome vestige of a time when artists could
afford to let their guard down without fear of being assailed by so-called
haters on social media.
And inside the would-be modesty, needless to say, is an implied boast: I'm
so fabulous that I don't even have to make a show of it.
That's the quality that comes through in a vintage Streisand video clip that
may tell us what to expect if a duet with Adele ever materializes (and
perhaps why one hasn't). An excerpt from "The Judy Garland Show" in the
early '60s -- when Garland was the established veteran and Streisand the
rising phenom -- it shows the two joining voices for a savage but somehow
casual run through "Happy Days Are Here Again."
Before they sing, Garland introduces the younger performer by telling her,
"We've got all your albums at home, you know, and you're so good that I hate
you."
Streisand laughs insouciantly, confident enough in her own abilities that
she hardly feels the need to respond.
She does anyway of course: "You're so great that I've been hating you for
years," she tells Garland. Then the music starts up and each singer eyes the
other as though she's sizing up a meal.
Fast-forward half a century to Streisand and Adele, and it makes you wonder
if Staples Center -- let alone a little duets album -- would be big enough
for the both of them.
