“If you hear this piece Paul Grabowsky has written you’ll understand what we’re doing. You’ll levitate,” begins singer and composer Lisa Gerrard.

The utterly transportive, Drouin-based, multi-award winner is being typically elusive. She has been tapped by seasoned pianist Grabowsky to team up with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for a Metropolis New Music Program show titled Immortal Diamond.

Singer Lisa Gerrard and composer Paul Grabowsky ahead of their collaboration on Immortal Diamond.Credit:Paul Jeffers

The performance will respond to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection. Respond is the right word. Gerrard merely has placeholder ideas – she mostly runs on intuition.

“Paul sent me the pieces but I don’t want to learn them too closely so if I sing them they’re the same,” she says. “I only sing where voice has a purpose. What I do with music is I’m unlocking things that are already there. I can do it almost identically [each time], even though its abstract.”

Grabowsky has known the poem since he was a teenager. “I love its extraordinary word-painting and ecstatic tone.”

Word-painting and aural ecstasy are Gerrard’s strong suits. As insinuated above, Gerrard simply gives in to her muse and lets her voice roam where it may. “Traditional language doesn’t always cover the heart and soul. When you hear someone sigh it communicates a million words.”

Since beginning Dead Can Dance in 1982 with collaborator Brendan Perry, she’s been the benchmark for beguiling, just-out-of-reach vocalists. Touted as record label 4AD’s biggest selling artists, Gerrard has just finished touring with Dead Can Dance for five months. “Our fans bring their kids to the shows now,” she quips.

Lisa Gerrard and Paul Grabowsky.Credit:Paul Jeffers

The 61-year-old is feeling match-fit for Immortal Diamond, as long as she sticks to her pre-show rituals. “As my timbres drive towards their use-by date I try and warm up by mostly breathing out short breaths (‘ha ha ha,’ she staccatos). I need to give my voice a chance to silken out.”

When Gerrard does sing, she is channelling something else altogether otherworldly and delightfully unsettling. Her voice has provided a stirring backdrop to films such as Black Hawk Down, Mission Impossible 2 and The Insider but it’s her collaboration with Hans Zimmer on the Gladiator soundtrack for which she is best known; the duo won a Golden Globe Award for the score. Gladiator’s original soundtrack sold truckloads of CDs and her pieces from the Russell Crowe teeth-gnashing, Roman-bashing flick have hundreds of millions of streams. This pockets Gerrard a healthy monthly retainer via digital streaming platforms — no doubt a huge help during the pandemic.

“I’m humbly established, I didn’t have the stress during COVID of what others were going through,” she says. “Through it I managed to record three albums, all done online with composers, which was a massive breakthrough for me, I usually have to be sitting in the same room as a director. I felt a bit guilty during COVID; I was able to spend an entire 12 months at home watching the seasons in my own house, it was divine,” she says, adding, “I have been on the road for 21 years.”

Appropriate for our times, Immortal Diamond will have themes of healing and renewal. Grabowsky says “the music will ebb and flow slowly like a tide. The orchestra and 16 wordless singers embedded within it will wrap around her [Gerrard’s] voice.”

When pressed, Grabowsky names the line in the poem which helped him begin sculpting the piece.
“I love the final line: ‘This Jack, jake, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond/ is immortal diamond’. I’m not a religious person but these words are simply beautiful, and a moving evocation of the man called Jesus Christ,” he says.

“Lisa has drawn out of me a work which is a response to the pandemic lockdowns and the closest thing to a personal spiritual statement I have made thus far.”

Grabowsky drew out something specific from his musical partner too. “I do one piece in English that I wrote myself; Paul insisted,” Gerrard says. “It’s a placeholder, an escape route. People will have quite cathartic experiences; other people will get a bit weepy. It will start to unlock things that we keep very hidden.”

Immortal Diamond will be less improvised than previous performances by Grabowsky and Gerrard. In theory.

“We walk towards the work without any preconceived sorceries. I’m improvising with him and we’re building a pathway towards each other in the track and unlocking what is intrinsically in the piece. I’m coming like the ghost at the banquet,” she laughs. “The rest will be said in the performance, in the ether.”

Immortal Diamond with Paul Grabowsky, Lisa Gerrard, MSO and conductor Benjamin Northey. Hamer Hall, Oct 5, 8pm.

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