By Nancy Marlowe
Amanda Gardner Porter is a petite person who psyches herself up to sing large.
“A singer is an athlete,” she explains. “A small person has the idea of themselves as small. I have to imagine I’m bigger and give myself permission to take up enough space to sing. The physical follows the mental in singing. You have to play all these mind games.”
And yes, the All Souls’ chorister admits, it is scary to sing out alone and unaccompanied when singing the Psalm in Sunday morning worship. “I have tripped over the words,” she said. “The Psalms are tricky sometimes.”
All Souls’ congregation, from the choir’s point of view, is unusually enthusiastic in singing the hymns. “Everybody looks like they really want to be there and participate. That’s rare.”
Amanda Gardner came to All Souls in 2004 at the suggestion of the cathedral’s former choirmaster, Marilyn Keiser. She came to Asheville that same year to play the trouser role of Cherubino in Asheville Lyric Opera’s production of Le Nozze di Figaro. “I went on to sing other roles, including Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus.”
In opera, Amanda sings as a lyric mezzo-soprano. According to Wikipedia, a lyric mezzo-soprano should be “A flexible, expressive voice; an excellent actress …”
In the late 18th century and the 19th century, she said, mezzos often were cast in young men’s roles, called “trouser roles,” in operas, in order for the composers to portray some male characters as young boys or adolescents. It was somewhat controversial, as audiences could see a woman’s ankles and the outline of her legs when she sang these roles.
Amanda sang in four Asheville Lyric Opera productions and met her future husband, Michael Porter, who was singing in the chorus. “He looked so young,” she said. “At first I thought he might be a student.” In fact, Michael was teaching at Brevard College and completing his doctoral dissertation. They were married in 2008.
Amanda aspires to enough singing “gigs” to sustain a career. In the meantime, her day job is as the Human Resources Coordinator of Brumit Restaurant Group (d/b/a Arby’s).
To begin in the middle with the beginning, Amanda was born in Atlanta, a descendant of North Carolina’s Old Salem Moravians. She was graduated from high school in Camas, Wash., after which the family returned eventually to Winston-Salem.
Amanda was skilled at piano, violin and choral singing (first solo at age five at a Lovefeast service at Home Moravian Church) and wanted to attend the N.C. School of the Arts to study voice. Her Moravian grandmother persuaded her to study at Salem College, where she herself had studied piano in the 1940s.
In graduate school at Indiana University, Amanda sang in the choir of the church at which Marilyn Keiser played the organ. When the move to Asheville was imminent, Keiser told Amanda, “You must sing at All Souls,” and made a call to All Souls’ choirmaster Kyle Ritter. The rest is history.
Amanda’s voice has great range as does her acting ability. In a recital at All Souls, she demonstrated her talent as a comedienne by singing the “tipsy aria” from La Perichole by Jacques Offenbach. In this scene from the French operetta, the title character has had too much to drink and is staggering around and trying to remain quiet as she sings. The audience was, well, intoxicated with her performance.