Barbra: The Concert was Streisand's fourth live album since she began recording with Columbia Records in 1962.
Barbra Streisand wrapped up her incredibly successful concert tour in Anaheim, California on July 24, 1994. Her much-publicized return to the concert stage had scored her glowing reviews and made her longtime fans happy.
As Jay Landers and Dan Pine wrote in the album's liner notes:
In every city she played, including London, Detroit, San Jose, Anaheim, Las Vegas, and Washington, D.C., Barbra was received like a conquering heroine. Her hometown of New York was no exception. Anticipation of her six-night engagement at Madison Square Garden galvanized the city. New York was in a state of terminal buzz over its best-loved favorite daughter. Everyone wanted to be at the Garden. It was a special time in the history of the city.
Streisand constructed the show with her team to “reflect the values, musical influences, personal disappointments and triumphs that shaped her as an artist, as a woman, as a citizen, as a human being,” Landers and Pine wrote.
Barbra: The Concert, a gorgeously packaged 2-CD set from Columbia Records is really a complete record of those New York shows. All of Barbra's dialogue, all of the songs she sang, and a few rare moments that happened on stage are captured on the album.
“All of the performances are as they happened,” Jay Landers explained about Barbra: The Concert, which he co-produced.
“Nothing with Barbra is ever just handed in,” Marty Erlichman told the Los Angeles Times Calendar. “On these recordings there were 64 musicians and it takes a lot of mixing and editing to make it really sound live.”
Jay Landers also told the newspaper: “Fortunately, in this particular situation it was sort of a matter of being able to choose—and I don't want to sound too effusive—between great and greater performances of particular songs. We spent a considerable amount of time listening and relistening to all the shows recorded.
“One evening,” Landers said, “the composer Jule Styne, who did Funny Girl, was in the audience, front row center, and Barbra dedicated ‘People’ to him and the New York audience went berserk, so we wanted to have that. And on the closing night [of the New York run], Barbra's image was projected on the Jumbotron in Times Square where there were tens of thousands of people, and Barbra shouted out ‘Hello, Times Square!’ and we wanted to preserve that moment.”
