The Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square’s Christmas concert for 2023 was a musical celebration of the Savior’s birth with stories about family and loving and serving others.
Broadway singer/actor Michael Maliakel and British actor Lesley Nicol joined the Tabernacle Choir, Orchestra and Bells at Temple Square and Gabriel’s Trumpets as the featured guest artists during the concerts that began on Thursday, Dec. 14.
From the opening processional “Sing We Now of Christmas,” as choir members made their way to the Conference Center stage singing about people in the Nativity story going to find baby Jesus, to the finale of “Angels from the Realms of Glory,” the musicians and performers pointed to how service and love can help celebrate the season and remember Jesus Christ.
The concert continues Friday, Dec. 15, and Saturday, Dec. 16, and tickets have been distributed for those performances. Nicol and Maliakel will be featured in this week’s “Music & The Spoken Word” on Sunday, Dec. 17, at 9:30 a.m., and tickets are not required.
Finding the meaning of Christmas
Maliakel (pronounced “molly-uh-kel”), an Indian American actor and singer who is currently starring as the title role in Disney’s “Aladdin” on Broadway, said that growing up, his family’s Christmas celebrations included watching the Tabernacle Choir’s Christmas concerts. His family would celebrate mass at Christmas and Easter. One of his first jobs was as a cantor in his church.
As some of his greatest Christmas memories are with his family, he and his wife are working to build that with their 18-month-old daughter, Nina.
“Music will always be an important part of that,” he said.
His baritone voice soared with solos of “Joy to the World” and choir director Mack Wilberg’s arrangement of “I Wonder as I Wander.”
“You can’t help but sing about joy when you’re singing with one of the greatest choirs in the world,” he said.
He sang two festive songs with the choir — “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in a section titled “Christmas Once More” arranged by associate choir director Ryan Murphy.
Later in the program, Maliakel sang Wilberg’s arrangement of “God Help the Outcasts” from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” which is based on author Victor Hugo’s novel.
Hugo “painted an unforgettable picture of people who find themselves cast out” in the book, Maliakel said. Some people suffer physically, others mentally.
“So many more suffer a deep hunger in their souls, which reminds us that the real meaning of Christmas is love, and the greatest joy of the season is opening our hearts to all God’s children,” Maliakel said.
‘To love is to act’
Nicol, who is known for her portrayal of Mrs. Patmore in “Downton Abbey,” shared the story of how Hugo and his wife, Adele, began hosting meals for destitute and needy children in their home, including a Christmas feast. As she narrated the story, actors and dancers portrayed the “Les Misérables” author, his family and others around the stage that was decorated with a European stone chateau motif and tower representing the Hugo home.
Throughout the concert, images were projected around the Conference Center pipes that coordinated with the music or story.
The story, Nicol said, is about “family to which we are born and the family that forms around us.”
Victor Hugo married when he was 20 and had five children in seven years, including one who died soon after birth.
“Victor believed that all children came directly from God,” Nicol explained. Children featured prominently in many of his books, poems and plays.
When the family lived on the isle of Guernsey — in the only house they ever owned — Hugo would write in a room that had a view of the ocean.
One morning when Adele Hugo went to town, she saw two young girls without coats or shoes who were crying in the street and it touched her deeply. She wondered what she could do. She began to organize efforts to help young orphaned children. Victor Hugo continued to write, including characters who were children in need. During his research, he saw a medical report on how eating meat regularly can help prevent childhood diseases.
“Victor and Adele were inspired to act,” Nicol said. The dinners started with eight children and their mothers and grew to 15, then to 32. Adele Hugo also began collecting baby linens, or swaddling clothes, for the expectant mothers.
The Hugoes hosted a Christmas feast for 40 children, including a decorated Christmas tree with presents.
“They devoured more than food; they felt their love,” Nicol said. In time, about a third of the Hugoes’ household budget was used for the dinners.
“From his lookout, Victor frequently felt something move him, something beyond himself. ... His conscience prompting him to love others,” Nicol said.
Three days before he died, he penned the words “Aimer, c’est agir” or “To love is to act.”
“It is a golden thread that runs through all of Victor’s work,” she said. Hugo would say that the efforts were not charity, but a brotherhood.
“Victor hoped that when the children came around his table, they ate well. Like shepherds at the manger, they found there was room for everyone,” Nicol said.
The courage to act “comes from the light of the manger — the child born unto all of us,” she said. As people are filled with His love, they know each other as brothers and sisters. “In loving, serving and embracing God’s family, we discover the greatest Christmas gift of all — to see in one another the face of the holy child, even the face of God.”
When Nicol came out on the stage, she referenced her role as a cook in “Downton Abbey.”
“I finally made it upstairs,” Nicol said. She noted that as a cook, she spent most of her time in the kitchen downstairs.
Fellow “Downton Abbey” star Hugh Bonneville, who played Lord Grantham, was the guest narrator during the 2017 Christmas concert.
“My friend Hugh Bonneville said this place makes Downton Abbey look like a tool shed. Well, he wasn’t wrong, was he?”
Her brother, a doctor who lives in South Carolina, had tried for years to get tickets to the Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra’s Christmas concert. Since 2007, tickets have been distributed through a random selection method due to high demand.
He is planning to be at the concert on Friday, Dec. 15.
Songs of Christmas
The choir, orchestra and bells performed Wilberg’s arrangement of the festive French carol “Noe! Noe!” Then after their performances with Maliakel, the choir and orchestra performed “Vom Himmel Hoch” (“From Heaven on High”) with the trumpeters.
The orchestra’s performance of the French carol “Patapan” started softly and rose to the finale.
A choir and orchestra performed a trio of “Reflections of Wonder, Peace and Joy” with the reverential “Still, Still, Still” and Wilberg’s arrangement of “Peace be Mine” as the choir members spread out over the stage. The orchestra shined in the excerpt from Ludwig Van Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from Symphony No. 9 as both the choir and orchestra swelled to the finale.
The Gabriel Trumpets Ensemble joined organist Richard Elliott for his arrangement of “To Cradle Run,” which featured “Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella.”
The choir and orchestra performed the celebratory “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas” from “Home Alone 2” and, after Nicol’s narration, the soft lullaby-like strains of Wilberg’s arrangement of “O Little Sweet One.”
After Nicol shared the Christmas story from Luke 2, she and Maliakel joined the 360-voice choir, 90 orchestra members, 32 bell ringers, eight trumpeters and three organists for the traditional finale of “Angels from the Realms of Glory.”
The audience this year was limited due to the construction on and around Temple Square, and 18,000 tickets were distributed for the 21,000-seat Conference Center.
This concert will be broadcast on PBS and BYUtv next Christmas season.
The 2022 concert, “Season of Light,” premiered on PBS earlier this week and is showing this Sunday, Dec. 17, at 6 p.m. MST on BYUtv. It will air and stream on both channels through Christmas.
More Christmas concert photos
