Christmas Memories

1	I'll Be Home for Christmas
2	A Christmas Love Song
3	What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?
4	I Remember
5	Snowbound
6	It Must Have Been the Mistletoe
7	Christmas Lullaby
8	Christmas Mem'ries
9	Grown Up Christmas List
10	Ave Maria
11	Closer
12	One God

Barnes & Noble

Christmas Memories is only the second holiday album recorded by Barbra Streisand during her distinguished and prolific career. Her first, 1967's classic A Christmas Album, is the multiplatinum standard against which all others are measured. This new collection, nearly as definitive as its predecessor, is a sumptuous potpourri of standards and surprises, all wrapped in shiny arrangements, like brightly reflecting ornaments on a lovingly decorated Christmas tree. Streisand's legendary voice, smoother than silk and more honey-glazed than ever, glows on "I'll Be Home for Christmas," "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?," Schubert's "Ave Maria," and "A Christmas Love Song." Sensitively self-produced, Memories debuts the future evergreens "Grown-up Christmas List" and Ann Hampton Callaway's "Christmas Lullaby" as well as "I Remember," which Stephen Sondheim rewrote for this recording. Forty years into a remarkable recorded legacy, and long after most stars have lost either the ability or the incentive, Streisand continues to strive for perfection with gorgeous vocals that are undiminished by time. Christmas Memories is yet another triumph for the Greatest Star. David Cohen

All Music Guide

Barbra Streisand makes a point of noting that she completed this, her second Christmas album, before the tragic events of September 11, 2001, even going so far as to list the recording dates (July 19-September 7, 2001). And listening to the disc, you can see why. If great artists sometimes demonstrate an uncanny ability to take the temperature of the times with their work, this one can be said to have anticipated the dramatic change in mood that the terrorist attacks occasioned. Christmas music always mixes the celebratory with the nostalgic, some of its classic songs dating from the World War II era when families were separated and feared they might not be reunited. But Streisand's Christmas Memories accentuates that tone well into melancholy. The 59-year-old singer has assembled a group of songs that look back on Christmases past from a mature perspective that very much takes loss into consideration, beginning with one of those war songs, "I'll Be Home for Christmas." On two occasions, she has prompted lyricists to rewrite their songs, having Dean Pitchford alter the words to "Closer," a new song submitted to her, to reflect the death of her friend Stephan Weiss (husband of fashion designer Donna Karan) and even getting the amazingly pliable Stephen Sondheim to revise "I Remember" from his 1966 TV musical Evening Primrose. As remade, "I Remember" remains an extremely sad song, however. When she isn't mourning, Streisand is trying for grand statements such as the politically oriented "Grown-Up Christmas List" and the ecumenical "One God," songs in keeping with Christmas's sentimentality that seem perfectly chosen for the inevitably sober-tinged holiday season of 2001. In coming years, Christmas Memories may come to seem like a remarkably dour holiday collection, but for the year of its release, it could hardly be improved upon. William Ruhlmann