It’s not every day that a singer from Gardendale makes it to the famous stage of New York City’s Carnegie Hall.

But Monday, Krista Adams Santilli did just that.

Santilli, an operatic coloratura soprano who graduated from Gardendale High in 1996, performed in a concert which benefits a charity that helps needy families in New York.

“My mother, Mary Parkins, still lives in Mt. Olive,” Santilli said, “as well as my grandparents, Lee and Myra Parkins.”

Santilli attended Hayden schools through the seventh grade; her mother taught there. When her mother retired, she moved to what was then Erwin High for a short time, then the family moved to Gardendale and she finished school there.

It’s a world away from a girl who almost ruined her voice singing for her church in Center Point.

“I started, like a lot of kids, singing in church,” Santilli said. “I attended Parkway Christian Fellowship in Roebuck. I wanted to sing like the people I heard on the radio, such as Celine Dion and Mariah Carey, so I just imitated their sound.”

That began to cause her some problems.

“At 15, I was showing signs of vocal nodules — basically, callouses on the vocal cords,” she said. “They often have to be surgically removed. Luckily, I caught mine early enough that with some rest and training, I was able to fix the problem.

“That was how I got into voice lessons and opera, and at the time I didn’t even know what opera was. I thought it was that lady with horns,” she said, referring to the stereotypical character of Brünnhilde in operas by German composer Richard Wagner.

The lessons were to enable Santilli to sing correctly without further damage, with her hope that she would go back to the type of power ballads favored by Carey and Dion. A teacher at UAB, though, changed her course.

She ended up on scholarship at the University of Alabama, where she took interest in classics as well as musical theater. That led to further study in Italy, then to performances in such wide-ranging places as solo recitals in Germany, a concert tour in Australia and a national anthem performance at a Major League Soccer match in the old Giants Stadium in New Jersey.

She also toured for two years with with pianist and composer Eric Genuis, singing in more than 250 concerts.

An operatic tenor from the Birmingham area might surprise many, but not Santilli, who says it has more followers here than people realize.

“We have a great local company in Opera Birmingham,” she said.

While it’s opera that pays the bills — as much as opera pays anyone’s bills, Santilli admits — she still wants to keep her hand in other genres for variety’s sake.

“From my standpoint, versatility isn’t so important for being financially secure. It is as much for myself as for anything else. I love singing all of these different styles so well, and I’d never be completely content to be stuck in one genre only,” Santilli said.

“For instance, I’ve done concerts lately with someone in ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ and I’ll sing an aria for Puccini’s ‘La Bohème,’ and then I’ll do something by Rosemary Clooney from the 1950s, then another aria, and then finish up with ‘At Last’ by Etta James. But it works!”

Santilli performed in Weill Hall at the Carnegie, a smaller recital hall that is one of the two original performing venues at the hall, dating back to its opening in 1891. The event is the Virginia Maitland Sachs Charity Concert, a series which began three years ago, and benefits Virginia’s House of Hope. The concert is actually Santilli’s third performance at Carnegie, but the first as a soloist; the others were as part of a larger group.

“This is more like a first time to me, because it is the first time that people have to come to Carnegie Hall just to hear me,” she said. “I think that’s what makes it so powerful.”

Santilli is married to a husband who has “the real job,” as she puts it, working for General Electric’s financial services division. They have three children.

On the Web: www.adams-santilli.com