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The Conference Center in Salt Lake City is site of the annual Christmas concert with The Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square.

Courtesy Intellectual Reserve

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Singer Megan Hilty will join the Choir for the December TV taping sessions in Conference Center, in Salt Lake City on Dec. 18, 2021.

Courtesy Intellectual Reserve

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Actor and producer Neal McDonough will join the Choir for the December TV taping sessions in Conference Center, in Salt Lake City on Dec. 18, 2021.

Courtesy Intellectual Reserve

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Some of the most sought after concert tickets in Utah are the Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square Christmas concerts. This year, residents will have to view them from home.

On Friday, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the choir announced it will not perform its traditional Christmas concerts for a public audience in 2021.

Instead, choir president Michael O. Leavitt has announced that the December Christmas musical event will be a two-hour retrospective television special titled “20 Years of Christmas With The Tabernacle Choir,” featuring Broadway’s Brian Stokes Mitchell as narrator and guest soloist. The television broadcast will be available on PBS and BYUtv.

Leavitt explained, “Every year, the Christmas concert by The Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square is a gift to the world from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This year, our gift is this 20th anniversary special with highlights from two decades of concerts celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. Since COVID precluded holding and recording a live Christmas concert last December, we are extremely pleased to continue our decades-long tradition of Christmas programming on PBS, with this exceptional broadcast.”

Tapings for 2022

The choir president also announced that to continue the TV special tradition in 2022, taping sessions with the choir organization ensembles and guest artists will be held in December. These taping sessions will not be open to the public. A small group of invited guests, comprised primarily of choir organization members’ families, will be seated in the audience for the closed tapings.

Guest artists, actress and singer Megan Hilty and actor and producer Neal McDonough, will join the choir for the December TV taping sessions.

Hilty is most recognizable for her portrayal of Ivy Lynn in NBC’s musical drama “Smash.” A Tony Award nominee, Hilty also starred in “Patsy & Loretta” on Lifetime. The role earned her a Critics Choice Award for Best Actress.

Hilty’s television credits also include Hulu’s “Difficult People,” the final season of CBS’ “The Good Wife,” and its CBS All Access spinoff show “The Good Fight.”

McDonough has been seen in over 100 films, including the award-winning Christian film “Greater,” “Captain America,” “Forever Strong” and “The Warrant” along with nearly 1,000 hours of television dramas.

Television special

“Putting together this retrospective was a remarkable, unexpected journey,” Mack Wilberg, music director of The Tabernacle Choir, said. “The difficult part was selecting what should be included, given the wealth of material we had to work with. We also wanted to provide the interesting story of how the Christmas concert has been put together, featuring not only the army of volunteer performers from the choir organization, but also the many world-class guest artists we have had the privilege of working with over the past 20 years.”

The Tony Award-winning Mitchell — known as “Stokes” to his colleagues — narrates the two-hour retrospective.

Stokes demonstrates that the feature of the Conference Center Christmas is not the wide range of musical genres and the diversity of guest artists. The special displays a spirit of bringing people together — it’s about Christmas for everyone, according to a church statement.

Audiences will view never-before-seen additions to the Christmas concert, including Mitchell’s performance of Wilberg’s new arrangement of “That’s What Christmas Means to Me,” with Wilberg at the piano; a new Richard Elliott organ solo (an adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s “Trepak” from Nutcracker Suite); and an amazing rendition of “Infant Holy, Infant Lowly,” recorded using a socially-distanced Orchestra at Temple Square.

Separately recorded “selfie” videos of each individual choir member were compiled and floated onto the screen, creating a “spectacular” virtual choir, according to a press release.

“The message of Christmas is universal. … The music, the stories, the singing, the dancing and the sharing are all a reminder that the birth of Jesus Christ is about peace and goodwill for everyone,” Stokes tells the audience. “It’s why the joy of Christmas really is joy to all the world.”

“20 Years of Christmas with The Tabernacle Choir” will air and stream on PBS TV and PBS.org on Dec. 13 at 7 p.m. MST with a re-airing on PBS TV at 6 p.m. Dec. 24. BYUtv and http://BYUtv.org will air and stream the program at 7 p.m. Dec. 16 with re-airings on BYUtv at 5 p.m. Dec. 19, 8 p.m. Dec. 24 and 1:35 p.m. Dec. 25.

On-demand viewing of the two-hour program will be available on both networks’ websites after the respective premieres on http://pbs.org/tabernaclechoir and http://byutv.org.

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