Record review: Christmas Memories

’Tis the season to make money?

One knows that Christmas has lost all religious specificity when a Jewish girl makes and sells a Christmas album – twice. In this age where everything (even a national tragedy) is commodified, the suspicion easily arises that Christmas is just another capitalist invention: ’tis the season to make money. That is what Christmas Memories can make one feel – and it isn’t because the album cover borders on the tacky and the singer is Jewish.

Christmas Memories is Barbra Streisand’s second Christmas album. It consists of both the traditional (I’ll Be Home For Christmas) and the contemporary (Grown-Up Christmas List), both the secular (A Christmas Love Song) and the religious (Ave Maria). What is odd about it – and what reminds us that it is, in the end, a commodity for consumption – is that it is less about the holidays per se, whether celebrated secularly or canonically, than about everything else the season may evoke: longing, love, reverie. Christmas is merely a backdrop, and it isn’t necessarily a merry one.

That, of course, is not bad if one is not looking for the Christ in Christmas. It doesn’t take much effort to convince oneself that the album transcends Christmas, although it is certainly occasioned and sustained by it materially and conceptually. For the songs that have little to do with Christmas count among Streisand’s better work in recent years and can easily survive the passing of the season. Followers of the singer know that this is not the first time she has taken a song out of its context and made it her own. Silent Night, for example, was never so stirring as when she sang it in Central Park in the summer of 1966.

Among these non-holiday songs are Closer and Snowbound, a lushly orchestrated love song that recalls, in Streisand’s words, "an old ’40s movie" as well as Streisand’s version of Speak Low (from her 1993 album Back to Broadway). A Christmas Love Song and Christmas Mem’ries, both by the Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Streisand’s longtime friends, are remarkable only for sounding like rehashes of their earlier and better compositions for the singer (e.g., Places That Belong to You, Simple Pleasures, On My Way to You, etc.).

What stands out among the tangentially Christmas tracks is I Remember. Although it was originally meant for a musical, Streisand convinced Stephen Sondheim, the composer of the song, to write an opening verse to "reframe" it as a Christmas song. (Streisand is probably one of the few singers who can have their way with composers.) As always, the Sondheim’s figures are fresh while staying proper to the context: a girl living in a department store recalling the outside world. Consider: I remember leaves/green as spearmint/crisp as paper. I remember trees/bare as coat racks/spread like broken umbrellas. Streisand captures the yearning of the persona, and with William Ross’ haunting musical arrangement, she has never sounded more poignant. (It would be instructive to compare her version with Sarah Brightman’s more straightforward performance.)

But what of Christmas itself? There are Frank Loesser’s classic What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve and the new song It Must Have Been the Mistletoe. The second is the only upbeat number in the album, although it is nowhere nearly as energetic as Streisand’s Jingle Bells (in the first Christmas album). It can serve as a commercial jingle, which is to say that the melody sticks.

If listeners find the above songs too wordly, Ave Maria should satisfy them. (Ave Maria is, truth to tell, the only identifiably Christian song in the entire album.) Streisand records the more popular version (Schubert’s) this time. Backed by a choir and harmonizing with her own voice, she makes us forget that she is Jewish. So moving is the music. (Her version calls for a comparison with that done by Streisand’s heir apparent Celine Dion, who made us forget that she was Canadian when she sang God Bless America.)

The album closes with One God, a rousing song originally done by Streisand’s favorite singer Johnny Mathis. The song sounds like an anthem for ecumenism (Many the ways all of us pray to One God/ Many the paths winding their way to One God/Brothers and sisters, there were no strangers/After his work was done) and also, the cynic may add, a rationale for Streisand’s cashing in on Christmas. The theology professor may question its orthodoxy ("For your God and my God are one"), but everyone else will be content with the music.

A final observation: It is a noticeably older Streisand we hear. The voice has lost much of the power, though none of the expressiveness, which made Streisand the best-selling female vocalist of the past century. The vibrato that gives body to an otherwise shrill note is gone, and instead of "belting," Streisand opts to glide, slide, and bend – all the tricks in the trade to scale, if she cannot avoid, that high note or to sustain a long one. She makes up in finesse what she lacks in power. Succeed for the most part she does, capitalizing on the warmth that age has given her voice. At 59 she cannot be expected to sound like 26. One listens rather for those dimensions added to a song, nuances refined, subtle textures revealed – and these she delivers abundantly.

It is easy to forgive her, then, even when it’s rather obvious that she is out to milk our Christmas monies for whatever they’re worth. Memory (or its variants) has been appearing in her albums of late, indicating perhaps that she is at the end of her tether. But what a long tether – 40 years and 58 albums. If the mood of her recent efforts, especially Christmas Memories, is nostalgic, it is only because she has made enough memories to look back on, Christmas time or otherwise.