Today we are turning our attention to a sensational TV special featuring music icons Barbra Streisand and Burt Bacharach in honor of this week's release of Streisand's new duets album, PARTNERS.
Close To You In 1971, the music of composer Burt Bacharach and lyricist Hal David was positively ubiquitous throughout the United States. The recent Academy Award-winning success of the soundtrack and lead single for 1969's multi-award-winning BUTCH CASSIDY & THE Sundance KID, "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head", firmly established Bacharach & David as a team in the very top-tier of modern music, while a string of striking hit singles for the likes of Dionne Warwick, Tom Jones, Perry Como and many more displayed their popular charm, as well. Yet, it was with the marriage of the music and lyrics of this titanically gifted team with the blazing, brilliant talent of the increasingly vaunted vocalist known as Barbra Streisand that would contribute most to creating a classic and outright unforgettable TV moment - or, in this case, several of them. On March 14, 1971, SINGER PRESENTS BURT BACHARACH was shown on CBS and featured Streisand joining the composer at the piano for an intimate conversation about life, love and music, as well as several performance set-pieces - in addition to appearances by Tom Jones, Rudolf Nureyev and Bettie De Jong, too. Nonetheless, the trio of showstoppers tackled by Streisand over the course of the awe-inspiring telecast are among the most unique, fascinating and just-plain purely entertaining in the vast array of performance footage available of the consummate entertainer from over the decades. As Bacharach himself told the press at the time, "The best things I've seen on television were done by Barbra," and with the creation and enacting of this special Bacharach could claim to have maintained the perilously high standard set forth with her previous work, on TV and beyond.
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