Barbra Streisand, Love Will Survive, review: an astonishing confrontation of anti-Semitism
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A delicate piano picks out a slow motif, strings swell with sweet sadness, and a very familiar voice eases softly into our ears with a tone of tremulous tenderness and a gorgeously world-weary stoicism.
Love Will Survive is Barbra Streisand’s first new song in over five years (since her last album, 2018’s Walls) and she makes every moment of count, picking out each syllable of the deathlessly romantic lyric with a slow, measured precision, then adding a few more syllables of her own for good measure. Because, after all, that is what Streisand does.
The theme tune for Sky’s forthcoming TV series The Tattooist of Auschwitz is released today, a melodically expansive if lyrically rather prosaic song about abiding love: “Until I find you / And walk beside you / Until we face every heartache together /I’ll keep believing / Feel you breathing / Hear your cries / With every season of sorrow /Somehow our love survives”.
Lyricist Charlie Midnight is not going to win any poetry prizes for rhyming ‘longer’ and’stronger’, ‘alive’ and ‘survive’, but he gets across the essential point of love enduring through darkness and uncertainty. The stately, sad melody (by film composers Hans Zimmer and Kara Talve, whose soundtrack themes have been adapted with Grammy-winning songwriter Walter Afanasieff) adds layers of emotion to a structurally odd but elegant piece played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with lush precision, and Streisand delivers the whole thing with aching conviction.
She has said that she was tempted back into the studio “because of the rise in anti-Semitism in the world today”, as a way of remembering the “60 million souls who were lost less than 80 years ago.” As a Jewish American born during the Second World War, she has lived her whole life with a profound awareness of the impact of the Holocaust, which makes this timely song something of a passion project. It represents the first time she has deigned to sing a TV theme in her 64-year career.
It is nevertheless unlikely to convulse the music world with the same impact as Taylor Swift’s latest blockbuster release. Streisand has long since relinquished her once apparently unassailable title as the biggest selling female artist of all time to a parade of pop queens (Madonna, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Britney and Swift) and super divas (Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston). Yet Streisand reigns supreme in terms of longevity – and the vocal ability on display here demonstrates reminds us why.
At 82, you can just about hear the advancing years etched into Streisand’s voice – no longer perhaps quite as perfectly smoothly flowing in the high range or as fulsomely rich in in the low – but the sense of passing time lends its own gravitas to the song’s message of memory and endurance. Honestly, it would be a world-class performance by any standards. For an octogenarian who hasn’t performed live since 2019, it is astonishing.
Love Will Survive is released today by Columbia. The Tattooist of Auschwitz will stream from May 2 on Sky Atlantic and Now in the UK
