Yentl by Barbra Streisand

It's hard to imagine any single album less likely to sell on its musical merits than Yentl, soundtrack to the film starring, produced and directed by Barbra Streisand. Layered over dialogue and incidental moments in the film, these songs are the private thoughts of our heroine, sung from semi-whispers to Broadway belts by Streisand and accompanied by Michel Legrand's violins. Though the lyrics, by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, are masterfully restrained monologues, they are arias rather than pop songs. There are no choruses, no striking catch phrases, no hooks. As a filmic device, this soundtrack works as well as flashbacks or dry-ice vapors to illustrate unspoken ideas, moving the action by adding to our understanding of the heroine's motivation. But when the score is removed from the film, these same songs prove to have no heartbeat.

The fault lies with the bland, Muzak-riddled arrangements-as-tunes, which were penned by Michel Legrand. As airy as elevator music, undistinguished and barely recognizable as individual songs, the score leaves no lasting or definable presence. Though Yentl is a movie with a Jewish theme, a period piece about a period with more musical history and tradition than has yet been mined by all movies on the subject combined, Legrand's score fails to offer even the barest hint of ethnic or historical flavor. That is left to Streisand's vocals, though even she can't infuse white bread with the taste of rye. All she can do with this material is manipulate her big voice through intensity and tempo modulation to build the songs to a semiclimax. Soundtracks are meant to call up scenes and images from movies, but Yentl's doesn't begin to do that. All the while I was listening to the album, I kept wishing I could put on some music.