Joy with the Tabernacle Choir (BYU Broadcasting, GBH, Intellectual Reserve, PBS, aired December 17, 2024)

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

Last night (Tuesday, December 17) I watched a couple of quite interesting Christmas-themed shows on KPBS, including the annual Joy with the Tabernacle Choir (in previous years it’s been called Christmas with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir but they seem to be de-emphasizing the religious aspects this year even though the show was produced by the media arm of Brigham Young University) and a rather odd local video of a play called 1222 Oceanfront: A Black Family Christmas. Joy with the Tabernacle Choir was a quite good and pleasant program for its first all-music half but got dull and dreary later on. It began with a choral version of a song identified in the chyron (thank goodness for chyrons!) as “Sing We Now of Christmas” but which I’d heard before on the Kingston Trio’s Christmas album The Last Month of the Year as “Sing We Noël.” The chorus continued with a more obscure song called “Noël Noël” and then tenor Michael Maliakel, whose name I had to look up on line to make sure I was spelling it correctly, came out and did “Joy to the World” and the lovely John Jacob Niles song “I Wonder As I Wander.” Oddly, Niles’s piece has entered the Christmas songbook even though it’s more about Easter; the opening line is, “I wonder as I wander, out under the sky/How Jesus our Savior, he came for to die.” Michael Maliakel was a reasonably nice-looking twink who did a brief interview segment in which he stressed his heterosexual credentials with a wife and an 18-month-old daughter.

Then the choir and orchestra did “Von Himmel hoch,” a hymn tune attributed to Martin Luther (they thoughtfully translated it as “From Heaven on high” in the chyron) and the orchestra played an instrumental arrangement of the song “Patapan” by Bernard de La Monnoye from 1720, though their arrangement interpolated a bit of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” Then Maliakel returned for a couple of pop Christmas songs, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and though his pleasant but bland voice could hardly hope to match Judy Garland’s intensity on the first (and still best) version, he at least did it in a straightforward arrangement after the horrible rock one Kate Hudson had been saddled with on the previous night’s Little Big Town: Christmas at the Opry program. Afterwards the orchestra and chorus took over for a three-song medley: “Still, Still, Still,” “Peace Be Mine,” and an oddly truncated version of the “Ode to Joy” (“An die Freude”) finale from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The arrangement cut abruptly from the opening statement of the theme to the closing coda, removing about 15 minutes of the greatest music ever composed, though at least I give the choir points for singing it in the original German instead of an English translation. (I have two reissues of early English-language recordings of the finale to Beethoven’s Ninth, and in both the German word “Freude” is awkwardly translated as “gladness” instead of “joy” because they needed a two-syllable word to cover Beethoven’s phrase.) Their next selection was a French carol the chyron identified as “To the Cradle Run” but which I know better as “Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabella” – a stunning piece of music under either title – and after that they did a forgettable piece called “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!”

Then Michael Maliakel came back to sing “God Help the Outcasts” from the 1999 musical The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame (based on Walt Disney’s 1996 animated film of Victor Hugo’s story, premiered in Berlin in German and first performed in English at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2014) by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz. Ironically the song was written to be sung by Esmeralda, the story’s female lead, but Maliakel acquitted himself marvelously with it. Alas, it was presented in the program as a lead-in to the show’s weakest, dullest and most interminable segment, “Victor Hugo’s Wonderful Feast,” narrated by Lesley Nicol. She’s best known as the cook on the long-running British TV series Downton Abbey, and she began her appearance by marveling at the magnificence of the Mormon Tabernacle or wherever they were performing and saying, “I finally made it upstairs!” It was a 15-minute piece of narration with music about the big Christmas meals Victor Hugo put on for the poor children of Paris every year from the time he first made enough money as a writer to afford them until his death. At least I was hoping this rather clunky feature would spare us the obligatory dramatization of the Nativity, but after a nice little song called “O Little One Sweet” there was Nicol again reading the opening chapters of the Gospel According to St. Luke, the principal Biblical source for the Christmas story. The show closed with Michael Maliakel blessedly returning to sing a traditional carol listed on the chyron as “Angels of the Highest Glory” but better known as “Angels We Have Heard On High,” a nice enough closer but it didn’t make up for the putrid and boring segments Lesley Nicol had narrated in between. At least the TV director, David Warner, was on his best behavior and mostly aimed the cameras at what we’d like to see – the choir and, when he was singing, Maliakel as vocal soloist – and it was welcome that today’s Mormon Tabernacle Choir actually looks like America, with a large number of Black, Latino/a and Asian faces mixed in with all the white ones.