By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
“Suor Angelica” opens with the title character at work in the garden.
This is a comfortable place for Jill Gardner.
The soprano portrays the title character in Puccini’s “Suor Angelica.” And she, too, loves gardening. “I live my name.”
Gardner will also perform as Santuzza in Pietro Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” when the Toledo Opera presents a double bill to open its season.
Performances in the Valentine Theatre are Friday, Oct. 14 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Oct. 16, at 2 p.m. Visit toledoopera.org for tickets.
[RELATED: Toledo Opera staging tragic double bill]
Though these operas are often packaged with other one act operas – “Suor Angelica” is part of Puccini’s “The Triptych” of one acts, this is the first time Gardner has sung these two roles together.
“This is very rewarding, “ she said. These Italian verismo operas are perfect for her voice. They are also draw on all the skills of Gardner as a singing actress.
For her it was important that “Suor Angelica” be first on the bill. From the time she was approached about the engagement, she knew she wanted to open with “Suor Angelica.”
“It is much more of an intimate story. It’s like in another world. The journey that Suor Angelica goes on is to the heavens. Her music is so deep, and she is so trying to reconnect with this child who is taken from her. It is such a deeply spiritual presentation that I knew I had to start with that, Gardner said.
“Then we’re plunged back into the earth with ‘Cavalleria.’”
At the heart of both operas are passionate women. Suor Angelica, the daughter of a wealthy, powerful family, was sent to a cloistered convent after she gave birth to son out of wedlock when she was 15. The expectation is she will never see the child again, indeed she has heard nothing about him. But she still hopes.
“She lives to serve,” Gardner said. And it is through her garden and her knowledge of medicinal plants that she is able to serve the other sisters.
Gardner says that when another nun dies, Suor Angelica was able to concoct an analgesic that allowed her to die peacefully.
“It’s the heart of the mother, the heart of caretakers,” Garner said. She serves the other nuns, but waiting still. “She just wants to know that her child is OK.”
But then she learns that her aunt, the princess (Lauren Decker), has arrived to visit her. She learns that her son died two years before. “She gets plunged into this very dark place.”
All she wants is to be reunited in heaven with him, and without considering the spiritual implications, makes a deadly drug, which she consumes.
Only then does she realize that committing suicide is a mortal sin, so she prays to the Blessed Virgin for forgiveness, and to be reunited with her son.
The play ends with this heavenly vision.
“Cavalleria Rusticana” opens in a Sicilian village on Easter weekend.
Turiddu (Brian Cheney) is in high spirits. Earlier when he returned from the military he learned his fiancée Lola (Imara Miles) has married Alfio (Corey Crider). As revenge he has seduced Gardner’s character Santuzza. A jealous Lola has an affair with Turiddu – we’re a long way from the cloister here.
It is Santuzza who is the shamed woman. She seeks the help of Turiddu’s mother Mama Lucia (Decker) who runs the wine shop.
Gardner said the Toledo production, directed by Keturah Stickann, has adopted the interpretation of the libretto that assumes Santuzza is pregnant.
Santuzza, though, ostracized is the honest one, unlike Turiddu and Lola who strut into the church. Her character would have happily been a good Catholic wife and mother, Gardner said. Santuzza stays outside the church and asks Mama Lucia to pray for her.
When Alfio shows up she tells him about his wife and Turiddu. That leads to a duel and Turiddu’s death.
Gardner imagines that Mama Lucia takes her in and helps her raise the child who is “the last vestige of her son.”
Gardner loves these roles and is glad to be able to perform them in Toledo. He last performed here in “Tosca” in 2014.
“I love the Valentine Theatre,” she said “It’s such a beautiful theater. It’s great to be back.”
Gardner likes to say she entered opera through the back door.
Growing up in the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina, she was passionate about piano. I studied piano all the way through high school.”
Playing piano seemed fated. Her mother was studying piano while she was pregnant with her. Her mother says that her daughter “came out of the womb an went right to the piano.”
Gardner also did the usual musical activities, singing in church choir and performing in school musicals. When she was in seventh grade, she heard a Piedmont Opera production of “The Marriage of Figaro.”
She went to Centenary College of Louisiana to study piano. She studied voice as an elective. It became a minor. Her voice teacher entered Gardner in competitions, and she won.
Others wondered why she was still a piano major.
“When I got to the end of the degree, I had this come to Jesus moment,” she said. She went on to get her masters in vocal performance at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro and started her professional career in 2005.
Gardner said she’s glad she made the move to opera.
“I’m an avid reader,” she said. “I always loved poetry.”
As a singer she has the music and the text. “We’re communicating through these prisms of words, and I love that.”
She works to develop herself as an actress. “ I really do deem myself now as a singing actress. A lot of music I do demands that. … For a personality like mine I enjoy having that passion, that complete process. It’s music. It’s words. It’s drama and theater.”
And the double bill in Toledo has all those in spades. “That’s the beauty of these pieces.”
