Columbia Records released a lushly packaged LP of the soundtrack to Barbra Streisand's film, Yentl.
Yentl, of course, was Streisand's passion project which she directed, starred in, wrote and produced. At the turn of the century, the movie concerns Yentl, who lives in a shtetl and longs to study the Talmud like the other men. After her father's death, Yentl disguises herself as a man in order to follow her passion for study.
Streisand's friends, Marilyn and Alan Bergman, wrote the lyrics and the brilliant Michel Legrand composed and conducted the music.
The film's musical conceit was that only the character of Yentl would sing — her songs expressed her inner thoughts. Streisand explained, “Once Yentl leaves her village, she lives a secret life that cannot be shared with anyone and we all believed that the best way to capture that inner voice was in musical narrative. There was really no better way to reveal Yentl's unique perspective.”
Phil Ramone was put in charge of supervising the post production work on the film's music, soundtrack, and singles. Ramone had worked with Streisand for years in the studio, going back to his sound design for her concert in Central Park.
In his excellent book, Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music, Ramone described the technically difficult job of putting together the Yentl soundtrack, which straddled the new world of digital sound versus analog. Streisand wanted to utilize the new Sony 24-track digital recorder. However, they had already recorded the score on tape (a.k.a. analog). Streisand requested that Legrand's Yentl score be rerecorded on digital tape, with Legrand conducting to Barbra's already recorded analog vocals; effectively replacing the analog-recorded music with digitally-recorded music.
“Engineering-wise I'd never seen anything like it,” Jim Boyer (audio remixer) expalined in Ramone's book. “We were distilling both analog and digital media to a single analog master—for film and record.”
He continued: “I was blown away by Barbra's memory; we had dozens of tapes, and she could remember specific words and phrases that she wanted from each in the final take. It was awesome—scary, really. When we matched the vocals to the printed music score, the unfolded vocal take sheet was the size of the console. This was before automation—if you didn't write it down, it didn't get remembered. It was the beginning of the digital age and Barbra, Phil, and Columbia Records wanted to be in on it.”
The Yentl soundtrack was remixed at Lion Share Studios in Hollywood. Streisand spent the evenings working on the album mix, following a full day of mixing the film soundtrack in Culver City, California.
