Neck injury forces soprano Lisa Gasteen off world stage

MORE than a year since she last performed in public, and at the height of her global career, Australian soprano Lisa Gasteen has revealed she may never sing again.

MORE than a year since she last performed in public, and at the height of her global career, Australian soprano Lisa Gasteen has revealed she may never sing again.

"I have not practised for a long time now because it is so disheartening," the woman who has excited audiences from Covent Garden to New York to Berlin told The Weekend Australian.

Gasteen, 52, whose performances as Brunnhilde, Isolde, Aida and Elektra have made her an international star, is at home in Brisbane, hoping the agonising neck spasms that began after she pinched a nerve while picking cumquats 18 months ago will not end her career.

"I've got neuro-muscular spasming as a result of nerve damage in my neck," she says. "It may subside and it may not.

"I pinched a nerve in my neck in May last year and I did a concert in Adelaide in August when the spasms occurred all through the concert. It was a really, really awful experience. I didn't know if I was going to make it to the end of the aria, let alone the concert."

Gasteen has not sung publicly since and has cancelled forward bookings as far ahead as 2012.

The cancellations have been reported as due to a persistent neck injury, but this is the first time Gasteen has revealed the extent of her plight. The Brisbane-born singer is philosophical about a condition which, cruelly, is triggered only when she sings.

"There is a plus side to it," she says. "I am having a very ordinary life and there is a lot to be said for that. I see my husband every day and I see my children every day, and I have never had that.

"Now that the dust has settled, it is not all bad."

Gasteen has been told there is no guarantee the condition would respond to surgery but she plans to start cortisone treatment.

She made her debut in 1997, at New York's Metropolitan Opera as Aida, but it was when she debuted at Covent Garden in 2002 as Isolde that the critics went crazy.