Streisand, Pure and Unsweetened

You might not be surprised by what you hear on Barbra Streisand’s upcoming live two-CD set, “Barbra: The Concert.” After all, the recent tour that it documents is one of the most publicized pop treks ever--not to mention one of the highest-grossing.

But you might be surprised by what you don’t hear: overdubs.

“All the performances are as they happened,” says Jay Landers, who co-produced the album with Streisand.

It’s always been standard for so-called “live” albums to be, um, improved in the studio, and Streisand is one of show biz’s most notorious perfectionists. Her manager, Marty Erlichman, says that she was still fiddling with her recent HBO special an hour before it was telecast.

“Nothing with Barbra is ever just handed in,” Erlichman says. “On these recordings there were 64 musicians and it takes a lot of mixing and editing to make it really sound live.”

But Landers says that it was Streisand’s very perfectionism in planning and performing the concerts that made overdubs unnecessary.

“Fortunately, in this particular situation it was sort of a matter of being able to choose--and I don’t want to sound too effusive--be tween great and greater performances of particular songs,” Landers says. “We spent a considerable amount of time listening and relistening to all the shows we recorded.”

The album, which will be in stores Sept. 27 and will sell for about $30 in CD, was compiled from four shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden, with a bonus of a Disney medley (“Once Upon a Dream,” “When You Wish Upon a Star” and “Someday My Prince Will Come”) that Streisand only performed in Las Vegas. A “companion” home video being released the same day is identical to the HBO special, documenting the Anaheim Pond concert that closed the tour. The exception is that videos sold at Blockbuster video and music stores will have an extra song: “What Are You Doing for the Rest of Your Life?”

The two CDs are presented as Act I and Act II of the show, starting with the Marvin Hamlisch-led orchestra’s overture and Streisand’s opener, “As If We Never Said Goodbye” from “Sunset Boulevard.” Other selections include “Lover Man,” “On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever),” “Evergreen,” “The Way We Were” and a 10-minute medley from “Yentl.”

The album features Streisand’s full concert of 27 songs, plus much of the monologue material she used to introduce or link the numbers. Several other non-musical elements were included to underscore a sense of spontaneity.

Says Landers: “One evening the composer Jule Styne, who did ‘Funny Girl,’ was in the audience, front row center, and Barbra dedicated ‘People’ to him and the New York audience went berserk, so we wanted to have that. And on the closing night (of the New York run), Barbra’s image was projected on the Jumbotron in Times Square where there were tens of thousands of people, and Barbra shouted out ‘Hello, Times Square!’ and we wanted to preserve that moment.”