"In Performance at the White House: Spirit of the Season": A 2021 Relic from a Bygone Era

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, December 23) my husband Charles and I watched an odd but interesting rerun on KPBS: “Spirit of the Season,” the 2021 In Performance at the White House Christmas special from Joe Biden’s first year as President. I could tell it was 2021 because Dr. Jill Biden kept introducing it as “from our first year in the White House” and because the COVID-19 pandemic was still going on, as evidenced not only by Dr. Biden’s repeated references to front-line health workers but because of the black face masks being worn by some of the players in the on-site orchestra (the string and percussion players, who could be masked because they didn’t have to blow air through their instruments to get them to sound like wind and brass players do). It was an intriguingly planned show in that each performance took place in a different room of the White House, and it was nice to see Christmas trees in the various rooms and note they were all green and cheerfully decorated. (Jill Biden didn’t go in for Melania Trump’s famous horror-movie look of having a row of blood-red trees lining a hallway.) The show opened with the U.S. Marine Band played an instrumental version of the Mel-Tormé-Bob Wells “The Christmas Song” over which Joe and Jill Biden talked to introduce the program. Charles said he thought he recognized one of the Marine Band trumpet players as someone he follows on X nè Twitter and the ex-boyfriend of one of the Helix porn models.

After the show moved inside the White House the first performer was Camila Cabello doing a quite appealing version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” backed by a mariachi band. Then came one of the most stunning performances of the night: the a cappella vocal group Pentatonix doing a quite haunting version of “Amazing Grace,” with some variants in the lyrics and none of the awful vocal imitations of a drum machine that have wrecked previous Pentatonix performances. After that Billy Porter did a cover of Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas” (though I’ve known it better from the cover by the Motown group The Temptations). Then Andrea Bocelli and his son Matteo did a joint rendition of Adolphe Adam’s “Cantique du Noël,” a.k.a. “O Holy Night,” which Matteo Bocelli sang in English and Andrea sang in the original French. I’ve never been that big an Andrea Bocelli fan, though I don’t actively hate him either; in a previous blog post I called him “comfort music, in the sense of comfort food.” I noticed that his voice seemed a bit more ragged than it did in his heyday, when he was making complete opera recordings and appearing in staged performances (and when Andrea Bocelli was asked how he could do a staged opera when he’s blind, he said, “Exactly the same way I can move around my house”). After that Eric Church tore through a country-flavored version of “Joy to the World” with a quite good heavy-set blonde woman who sang backup for him and took the lead on one chorus. I’m guessing she’s Mrs. Church – I’m assuming Church takes his wife along with him when he tours the way Chris Stapleton does – but whoever she was, she sang a chorus and brought more soul to the song than he did (and he was certainly no slouch in that department!). Then there was a montage of First Families from Herbert Hoover’s to Donald Trump’s posing in front of the White House Christmas tree while the soundtrack gave us Brenda Lee’s classic 1958 recording of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”

After that the show featured an amateur vocal group of nurses called the Northwest Health Nurses’ Choir (and not all of them were women, either; there were at least two guys in the group and they were both hot!) doing Jerry Herman’s song “We Need a Little Christmas” from the musical Mame. Then Norah Jones came on with a sensitive but also a bit droopy ballad called “Christmas Calling (Jolly Jones),” and after that another group of three veterans and one active-duty servicemember called Voices of Service came on and did a really powerful song called “Choke.” Afterwards Andrea Bocelli returned, this time with another one of his kids – his pre-pubescent daughter Virginia – for a truly weird song choice: Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Once again Andrea and his kid sang in two different languages – Virginia sang in the original English and Andrea sang an Italian translation – and Charles made no secret of how he felt about a young girl who hasn’t gone through puberty singing such a world-weary and emotionally honest adult song. Virginia’s voice was O.K. for a kid but Andrea’s sounded better than it had on “O Holy Night.” The real problem with Bocelli padre è figlia doing “Hallelujah” was the big and very overwrought string arrangement behind them, which really got in the way of the simple beauty of Cohen’s song. (Come to think of it, Cohen himself had a “thing” for string arrangements; in John Hammond’s autobiography he told of having to talk Cohen out of adding strings to his early folk records, and in 1980 Cohen hired Phil Spector to produce an album for him, Death of a Ladies’ Man.) Then it was the turn of the Jonas Brothers, all three of them, to crank out a song called “Like It’s Christmas,” and afterwards the on-site orchestra played a quiet instrumental version of “Auld Lang Syne” that celebrated the song’s moving and unkillable melody.

The announcer said this was the 57th In Performance at the White House concert to be telecast, starting with the one Jimmy Carter hosted in 1978 featuring the legendary Russian classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Carter had recalled that when he was serving with the U.S. Navy’s submarine command during World War II he brought along a stack of classical records, including some by Horowitz, and his fellow servicemembers ridiculed him for his taste. None of the clips shown from previous concerts featured Donald Trump as host – I’m not sure he ever hosted any performers at the White House, not even ones sympathetic to his politics, like Toby Keith and Trump’s Bible business partner, Lee Greenwood – but there were plenty from Barack Obama’s two terms, including Paul McCartney (who sang “Michelle” directly to Michelle Obama), B. B. King, Aretha Franklin and other soul greats. Already this In Performance at the White House show from just three years ago seems like a forgotten relic of a bygone history, now that Trump is returning to the White House and will no doubt bring his terrible taste in music as in everything else – though maybe he’ll host a reunion of The Village People, seeing as “Y.M.C.A.” (an ode to Gay cruising at the titular establishment) appears to be his favorite song!