The first time Amy Grant performed with a full orchestra she was sure her pulse would drown out her voice.

As the Grammy-winning pop and Christian singer/songwriter stood before the microphone, waiting for her cue to come in with the orchestra in a live studio recording session in London, "I felt like you could hear my heart pounding in the room with all these highbrow, exquisite players," she said in a telephone interview.

"I just thought, 'Surely, you're picking up my heartbeat on this microphone.'"

But it was her voice that rang through in the 1992 album, "Home for Christmas," backed by a rich blend of strings, winds, brass and percussion. The experience got Grant over her initial intimidation and helped her embrace the symphony orchestra both in the studio and onstage in live performances like the show she'll bring to Evansville tonight.

Nobody need feel intimidated by anything she and the orchestra will play in The Centre, said Grant. "I'm not a fancy person. The way I think about these evenings, it's like a barefoot symphony performance." In a program featuring favorites from her nearly three decades as one of America's leading contemporary Christian and pop crossover stars, Grant will sing with the Evansville Philharmonic and her own ensemble. The music will range from pop hits including "Baby, Baby" and "It Takes a Little Time" to contemporary Christian favorites such as "El Shaddai" and "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee."

Her concert also will include covers of other popular songs "for people who have no idea what I sing, but just want to come to a symphony show," she said.

It would be hard to find anybody who hasn't heard Grant. Anyone who has listened even casually to pop or adult contemporary radio in the last decade has to have heard "Baby, Baby" and "I Will Remember You." Contemporary Christian listeners know "El Shaddai," "Find a Way," "Saved by Love" and lots of other songs.

And she's reached millions with Christmas albums, television specials and touring shows such as the one she played with her husband, Vince Gill, in Evansville three years ago.

At 45, Grant has sold more than 45 million albums and won six Grammy Awards and 21 Gospel Music Association Dove Awards. She has the distinction of being the first Christian music artist to have a No.1 pop song ("Baby, Baby") and to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Tuesday, she'll draw from her entire songbook to perform with piano, with her band and with the orchestra in a concert designed to showcase all of its elements, but to show how "sometimes the sum is greater than its parts," she said.

http://www.courierpress.com/news/2006/nov/14/orchestras-no-longer-unnerve-grammy-winner/