Tabernacle Choir brings its plush sound to town

Like some grand ocean liner from another era, the 300- voice Mormon Tabernacle Choir is sailing forth from Utah for its every-other-year tour with an unchanging course and sense of mission.

The concert locales rotate from year to year - Thursday's 8 p.m. performance at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts is the first here since 2003 - but the repertoire of hymns and folk songs, sung with the choir's distinctive majesty, isn't just a concert but perhaps the most visible public relations tool of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As opposed to, say, the scathing satire currently on Broadway, The Book of Mormon.

"All I know is that it's popular and the tickets are expensive," says music director Mack Wilberg, 56, on the eve of the tour that is taking the choir to Toronto, Chautauqua, N.Y., Norfolk, Va., and Washington, D.C. - with its own instrumentalists, the Orchestra at Temple Square, in tow.

More-informed reactions to The Book of Mormon are left to church elders, who have been remarkably even-tempered about it. And in any case, an hour spent talking with Wilberg suggests he has other things on his mind, occupying as he does one of the hot-seat choral positions in the United States, serving both musical and religious purposes.

Just ask, for example, why one of the world's great choirs infrequently gets around to singing the world's greatest choral music.

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir of old had numerous collaborations with the Philadelphia Orchestra, matching its lush, fathomless sound with the orchestra's gold-plated sonority in best-selling recordings of Handel's Messiah.

The choir still does some of that repertoire at home; a Berlioz Requiem is on the schedule for September. Mostly, though, its programs are more populist - music that fits logistically into its weekly radio broadcasts Music and the Spoken Word at 11:30 a.m. Sundays on KSL.com, and is philosophically suited to albums titled Love Is Spoken Here and Heavensong: Music of Contemplation & Light.

It's a distinctively American sound, says Matt Glandorf, director of Philadelphia's Choral Arts Society: "Even if their repertoire isn't your cup of tea, there is no arguing with the high level of professionalism and care that goes into making their sound what it is."

"The world is a big place and there's room for just plain beautiful lush singing for the sake of beautiful lush singing," adds Donald Nally, music director of the Crossing choir.

Indeed, the Mormon Tabernacle CDs sometimes make the Billboard Top 10 sellers in classical and classical crossover charts. The choir's radio broadcast is among the longest-running in history, having begun in 1929. But of the three components of the choir's mission - public relations, outreach, and art - has the last become the least significant?

Not in purely vocal terms. In decades past, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir had a reputation for a plush but amorphous sound - and that didn't go unnoticed at the Salt Lake City headquarters.

"We were told by our church leaders 13 years ago that the choir is great, we love the choir - but you have to be better," said Wilberg. "We had two options. We could ask people to rehearse more, which wasn't really an option. We decided that they had to be better prepared when they came into the choir."

Traditionally, the singers are volunteers, all active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - a community with particularly strong emphasis on family. So singing in "the Tab," as some call it, can never be an excuse for absentee parenting. (Wilberg, for one, has four children.)

Thus, the five hours of rehearsal each week go mostly toward the weekly radio broadcast. "It's a great thing," Wilberg says of the show, "but is very much a determining factor in what the choir does. We do 300 to 400 pieces a year. It's a pretty rigorous schedule in almost every respect."

The solution, then, is ever more rigorous standards for membership. There's a Mormon Tab farm team, the Temple Square Choir, which sings more classical repertoire. More significant, auditions for the Tab choir involve four months at the institution's choir school.

"Sightreading is a big priority. Very big," Wilberg says. "We used to put more emphasis on that in our choir school but found that singers who audition are pretty well prepared for that sort of thing."

That's a product of the choral culture of Salt Lake City, which has half the population of Philadelphia but at least as many major amateur choirs - and that's not counting nearby Provo, home of Brigham Young University.

Also important is the person behind the voice.

"We invest a lot of time and effort into our choir members, and those who are over 25 are a bit more stabilized in their lives," says Wilberg, explaining why younger people aren't considered. "We don't have a big turnover. You can be a member for 20 years or 60 years of age, whatever comes first. Once a year, we have a retirement celebration. It's a rather sad day. . . ."

On the current tour, they'll mostly be heard in large, semi-outdoor venues such as the Mann Center, which fits in the something-for-everyone repertoire but means the splendid sound is inevitably amplified. That's also the case at home, where the choir also sings in a 21,000-seat auditorium - the price of its own success. At least amplification technology is constantly improving, says Wilberg. But one can only imagine what the choir's robust sound was like eight years ago when one tour stop was at Tanglewood for Brahms' A German Requiem. And you'd think there would be plenty of requests for the choir's participation in such festivals.

"There probably would be - if we could make it happen," said Wilberg.

The chances of change in the choir's culture to enable that?

"If it's not broke . . . , " he says. And you know the rest.