Life with Lisa Gerrard

FUNNY that even after 25-plus years of Lisa Gerrard’s musical evolution through Dead Can Dance, her solo recordings and major film-score projects, some fans still showed up at her Orpheum Theatre concert Tuesday dressed in goth black -- one gent bearing the stovepipe hat and tails of a Victorian mortician. Gerrard herself, perched on a cloud of white cloth covering the stage, was, in contrast, full of light and life.

Or lives, as she seemed to embody multiple entities. Radiant in a blue gown and later in white, the Australian singer was part stately diva, part beatific abbess, as well as part imp when sticking her tongue out at someone in the wings. Her remarkable vocal instrument was all that and more, taking on a vast range of characteristics from earthy lows to ethereal flights.

Compared with the 2005 Dead Can Dance reunion with partner Brendan Perry, which played the Hollywood Bowl with full orchestra, this was an intimate recital. Accompanied by keyboard players John Bonner (a veteran of Dead Can Dance projects) and Michael Edwards, Gerrard highlighted material from her hypnotic, atmospheric new album, “Silver Tree,” but also drew on many phases of her work. As usual, she sang only a few songs in English; the rest were done, for the most part, in language that only she understands. Still, there was no lack of evocative emotions and imagery as cinematic as the Michael Mann (“Heat”) and Ridley Scott (“Gladiator”) films she’s accompanied.

In “Desert Song,” the sound was as expansive and undulating as the landscape of the title. The elongated, atmospheric tones of “Sacrifice” echoed the sad beauty of Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” (The Song of the Earth). On the new “In Exile,” she shaped her voice into sighing arcs one might hear from a mournful Armenian duduk. And here and there, as in “Maharaja” and the closing, torchy lullaby “Hymn for the Fallen,” she even conjured Billie Holiday in phrasing, if not exactly in tone.

Yet for all those facets, all those characters, Gerrard is truly singular -- an artist unlike any other, a spirit outside of conventions. At the Orpheum, it was as if she brought all colors into one. Which is -- oh, right -- black.