The Daily Telegraph - Features
Streisand’s first ever song for TV is a triumph
Pop
Barbra Streisand: Love Will Survive ★★★★★
A delicate piano picks out a slow motif, strings swell with sweet sadness, and a familiar voice eases softly into our ears with tenderness and stoicism. Love Will Survive is Barbra Streisand’s first new song in more than five years, and she makes every moment count, picking out each syllable of the deathless, romantic lyric, 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 series The Tattooist of Auschwitz – her first ever song for television – 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, but he gets across the essential point of love enduring through darkness and uncertainty. The stately melody (by film composers Hans Zimmer and Kara Talve) adds layers of emotion to a structurally odd but elegant piece played with lush precision by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and Streisand delivers with conviction.
The Jewish American has said that she was tempted back to 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”.
At 82, you can just about hear the advancing years etched into Streisand’s voice. 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