Lisa Gerrard
The Best Of Lisa Gerrard

The release, in February 2007, of this anthology CD is a good opportunity to return to discussing one of the most exciting voices of the last decades, that of Lisa Gerrard. She made an immediate impression in the mid-'80s as the muse of Dead Can Dance, the duo she was part of alongside fellow Australian Brendan Perry.

An ancestral voice, coming from the darkest recesses of the soul, and not by chance those records were released by the leading label of the dark wave sound of the time, the London-based 4AD. And like Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins (another flagship made in 4AD), Lisa Gerrard’s is a voice that does not tune a text, does not sing words set to music: it becomes sound among sounds, articulating phonemes of a remote primordial language by whose charm we remain completely captivated.

This "Best Of" thus restores to us in 75 minutes of music some significant moments of Gerrard's charismatic voice: Dead Can Dance cannot be missed, evoked, for example, by "Cantara" and "Persephone" from their third album of 1987, and by "The Host of Seraphim" from the fourth, of the following year: and here it would suffice to comment on the title of the track, "The Host of Seraphim," which are then angels...

The solo phase of Lisa Gerrard is not missing, which began a year before the dissolution of the original group, and in this case, "Swans" and "Sanvean" (the latter recorded live) represent the first solo album ("The Mirror Pool", 1995) up to reaching the recent and successful phase as a soundtrack author: hers for example, with Hans Zimmer, that of Ridley Scott's "Gladiator"; in this anthology, however, there is "Go Forward" from the film "Whalerider" by New Zealand director Niki Caro.

But Lisa Gerrard is an emblematic example of artistic personality for whom wasting oneself in comments is futile and perhaps counterproductive, and where instead the experience of listening transcends any possible analysis: noble and dreamy, magnetic and otherworldly, celestial and piercing, hers is a voice enchanted and enchanting.