FULL IMMORTAL DIAMOND (Grabowsky) Melbourne 2022 Lisa Gerrard

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: Immortal Diamond  
• Composer: Grabowsky PPaul  
• Libretto: Gerard Manley Hopkins  
• Venue & Opera Company: Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne, Australia  
• Recorded: October 5, 2022
• Type: Concert Live
• Singers: Lisa Gerrard
• Conductor: Benjamin Northey  
• Orchestra: Melbourne Symphony Orchestra  
• Stage Director:   
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: mso  
• Date Published: 2023  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: nosubs  

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

  MSO.LIVE continues its month of Australian music with Immortal Diamond, a new work by multi award-winning Australian icon Paul Grabowsky AO. Borrowing its title from a poem by Victorian-era English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Immortal Diamond comprises five sections that explore atmospheres of drama, dissonance, and mysticism. Renowned Australian soprano Lisa Gerrard sings in a floating free style alongside sixteen wordless singers. Though it pays tribute to a nineteenth-century poet, Immortal Diamond speaks to a very contemporary experience. Written during Victoria’s COVID-19 lockdowns, the work, in Grabowsky’s words, ‘can be understood as a secular requiem for those who passed, and a prayer for better days ahead.’

  “Immortal Diamond borrows its title from a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins, called That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of Resurrection, in which his unforgettable final lines describe his relationship to Christ:
  since he was what I am, and
  This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
  Is immortal diamond

  This beautiful poem, full of extraordinary sound pictures, provides the inspiration for a sound world in which Lisa Gerrard will range freely, one that speaks of the power of spiritual love and renewal. The music will ebb and flow slowly like a tide, the orchestra and sixteen wordless singers embedded within it will wrap around her voice, occasionally falling away to the ruminations of the piano as it continues accompanying a song that—in a sense—has no beginning and no end.”

  — Paul Grabowsky AO, MSO Composer in Residence

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