Tomorrow night (Monday night), I will be giving the tenth in a final series of eleven “Learn Our Religion” lectures up in West Jordan, Utah. Reservations are required, I believe — by no later than 4 PM on the day of the lecture — and there is a charge for attendance. The title that has been announced for my remarks is “Mormons, Muslims, Muhammad and More . . . ”
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Update: I’m sick. (Something that my critics have always maintained but that, right now, happens to be true.) So I’ll be doing this lecture from home, and it will only be available via streaming.
One of our favorite parts of Christmas is the invitation from Jeri and Stephen M. R. Covey to attend an evening of superb music in their capacious home. We attended last night. And one of the measures of how much we like and look forward to the event is the fact that, although, to our surprise, we had obtained tickets for the annual Christmas concert of the Tabernacle Choir and the Orchestra at Temple Square, we surrendered those tickets in order to be able to attend the Coveys’ program.
Just to give you some sense of it: After a word of prayer, the program commenced with all of us singing “Far, Far Away on Judea’s Plains,” led by Clayne Robison. That was followed by a violin performance, accompanied on piano, of a medley of “Adeste Fidelis” and “Away in a Manger.” The BYU-student violinist, whose name I unfortunately didn’t catch, recently won a national violin competition.
She was a member of a BYU string ensemble — if I heard correctly, the section leaders from the string sections of the BYU Philharmonic –that also played, as well as accompanying several of the subsequent numbers.
An alto soloist from BYU then sang a unfamiliar setting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous Christmas poem “I heard the bells.” I think that I heard it said that she will shortly be singing with the San Francisco Opera.
A substantial portion of the program featured the superb Lux Choral Society. According to the notes that I scribbled while they were singing, they performed “Once in Royal David’s City,” “The Holly and the Ivy, “The First Noel,” “O Holy Night,” “Rise Up, Shepherds, and Follow,” which probably originated as a spiritual among plantation laborers, and a spiritual entitled “I am a Child of God” that bears no resemblance or relationship to the familiar Latter-day Saint children’s hymn. I have always found one particular passage from “O Holy Night” especially stirring, and I did so again last night in their soloist’s rendition:
Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is Love and His gospel is Peace;
Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother,
And in his name all oppression shall cease.
The absolutely transporting first number in their segment of the program, though, was Franz Biebl’s setting of “Ave Maria,” about which I myself wrote in a recent blog entry. See “The Angel Of The Lord Appeared Unto Mary.” Unspeakably beautiful. (The song. Not my blog entry.)
The male soloist from the Lux Choral Society also gave us a wonderful version of the Christmas carol “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” which was written in the style of an African-American spiritual back in the 1930s. It was followed by a solo of “Weeping Mary,” accompanied by piano and violin. I’ve had a terrible time trying to find a recording of it online, but I did come up with this, which will have to do.
The alto soloist then came forward for a performance of “O, Divine Redeemer,” and we closed with Clayne Robison leading all of us in standing to sing Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” which was followed, as every year, with wonderful food.
I’m grateful, today, that the Coveys have this annual tradition, and that my wife and I are included in it.
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