A voice and a vision that are true heartbreakers

One of the most acclaimed new bands of the year has no drums, no big amplifiers. Just an acoustic guitar, an electric bass, a cello and a violin and, sitting at the piano, a bohemian Buddha with an otherworldly voice and a dead aim at the hearts of his listeners.

With this elegant vehicle, Antony Hegarty and his musicians turned the Vista Theatre in Silver Lake into a kind of sanctuary Thursday, performing a show that was an hour long by the clock but so rapturous in spirit that it seemed to suspend time.

Antony & the Johnsons, as the New York-based ensemble is billed, play a form of chamber pop that’s designed to frame their leader’s unique voice and lyrics of pain, longing and transcendence -- on his own songs and, on Thursday, material by Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed and others.

The center range of Hegarty’s voice has a dusky tremulousness that evokes Boy George, one of his primary influences, and at the Vista that voice regularly unfurled into ribbons of high-register syllables and a pure, perfectly pitched falsetto with a touch as light as a sigh.

The capacity audience of about 500 was rapt, and the crowd and the setting underscored how much Antony’s voice and vision have suddenly surfaced in 2005 after years on the experimental fringes.

His second album, “I Am a Bird Now,” has won rave reviews in the mainstream press, and earlier this month in London it was named the surprise winner of the Mercury Music Prize, a connoisseur’s award for the year’s best British album (it qualified because Antony was born in the U.K. to English parents).

Sitting in a courtyard at his hotel near the theater earlier Thursday, Hegarty, 34, was shaking his head over the situation.

“I have some long-term dreams, and pretty much everything I’d ever dreamed of came true this year,” said the singer, a tall, striking-looking figure with large, doll-like features and a delicate speaking voice. “Just playing in beautiful theaters, and developing a rapport with a wider audience, meeting a lot of musicians I really admire.... It’s a little overwhelming.

“I think we’re in a phase where people want to get real about stuff. Somewhat in response to how cold and alienating a lot of the dominant culture has become,” he said. “There’s definite movement in artistic circles to return to something that’s very personal, as a way to reconnect or find some significant meaning or sense of hope about life.”

Record and concert producer Hal Willner, a key figure in ushering Hegarty to his current position, recalled the first time he heard one of his recordings.

“I put it on and whatever all the different things are that I look for in music, it was there,” Willner said in a separate interview. “That voice just killed me, and all of a sudden I was in his world.... This is the first time I’d heard anyone with that kind of high voice who could actually break your heart.

“I’m so happy he’s finding success now,” Willner said. “It’s the way it should be for someone whose music comes so much from his heart and is so personal and so different.”

Much of the allure of Hegarty’s music comes from its grounding in real and powerful issues. His self-titled first album from 2000 sorted through the aftermath of AIDS’ devastation on the gay community. “Bird,” he says, is more introspective, a dialogue among assorted internal characters.

“There’s a lot of issues of transformation in the record. Obviously the gender issues, between male and female and female and male, but also between young and old and life and death and darkness and light.

“The thing about a song is you hope that it will be open enough that people can bring their own experience to it and that it can open up in a way that embodies more than just the pedestrian details that it maybe originated from,” he said.

Hegarty, whose family moved often, taking him from England to Holland to various locations in the U.S., always knew he was “different.” When he was 12, he heard and saw Boy George and decided he wanted to be a singer.

He played a Casio keyboard and wrote songs through his teens, and after moving to New York he sang in clubs and worked in experimental-theater pieces before focusing entirely on music and the orchestral approach that has become his signature.

A big break came when Willner brought him to the attention of Lou Reed, who had him sing on his “The Raven” album and put him in his band for a world tour.

At every show Hegarty sang his exquisite version of “Candy Says,” one of the classic songs from Reed’s old band, the Velvet Underground.

Despite that experience, he’s still adjusting to the touring life on his own, especially with things on the upswing.

“It’s a little tiring sometimes,” he said, preparing to head to the theater for a sound check. “I kind of wish I could take this year and spread it over three years. But you kind of have to show up for your life when it shows up for you....

“I’ve been waiting 15 years for my life to come and get me, and now it came and got me by the scruff of the neck.”