Towards the end of the 1960s, Michel Legrand offered Barbra Streisand an exceptional recording project: a suite of songs based on the works of Marilyn and Alan Bergman that chronicles a woman's life from birth to death, passing through love and motherhood. The enfant terrible of Broadway jumped at the chance but in the end only recorded a few of the songs she was offered. Was she afraid of being unable to control her emotions when singing about death, or worried about not doing justice to the complete work, as she confided to Legrand? Did she refuse to tempt fate by singing about the autumn of her life and her own demise, as you could easily imagine? Although Michel Legrand had already composed more than half of the score, which evokes Schubert's Winterreise or Mahler's Song of the Earth, filtered through blues, jazz and musical theatre, the project was shelved indefinitely until another queen of the musical stage arrived to bring it back to life: actress and soprano Natalie Dessay, who enjoys nothing more than a challenge and for whom no project is too ambitious. "In 2008, Laurent Pelly invited me to the Théatre National de Toulouse where he was director and offered me carte blanche. Without really thinking I said: 'Okay, I'd like to do a show based on the songs of Michel Legrand,' convinced that the reclusive star would never give me permission to use his scores." The show, directed by Pelly and featuring Natalie Dessay alongside four other actors, pianist Thierry Boulanger and a big band with brass and string sections, was only performed twice in Toulouse, but it marked the start of a creative partnership between the composer and his new diva that quickly led to sixty performances worldwide. "Of course, I was overwhelmed to be interpreting classics like Splash, The Windmills of My Mind and Papa Can You Hear Me? with Michel Legrand at the piano, but this didn't stop me from asking him if he had any unreleased material that I could sing for him. When he played me the songs from Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, I was speechless. Although I've been a fan of Michel's music since I first saw Donkey Skin at the age of five, I have just as much admiration for Barbra Streisand, who I discovered in the film Funny Girl as a teenager. Fanny Brice, the lead character she plays, is by far the fictional heroine I identify with the most.“ Putting together a project as ambitious as Between Yesterday and Tomorrow was no easy task, as new songs needed to be written to complete the work–songs like You and I and Fairy Tales and Story Books–, along with new lyrics and arrangements in full. In the meantime, Michel Legrand and Natalie Dessay furthered their musical partnership by staging Les Parapluies de Cherbourg at the Théâtre du Châtelet, and recording Elle et Lui, an album featuring all of the Parisian legend's standards.