A Pioneer Day Commemoration Concert with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square July 21 regaled a Conference Center audience with festive song, at the same time paying solemn homage to the Latter-day Saint settlers of Zion in the Mountain West.
The Brett Family Singers, a popular attraction in the entertainment resort town of Branson, Mo., were featured performers at the event. The LDS family, consisting of father, Tom, mother, Andrea, and children Briahna, 24, Brydon, 21, and Gordon, 16, drew a prolonged standing ovation with their tight harmonies and soft renditions of Broadway standards "Together Wherever We Go," "Where Is Love?" and "The Impossible Dream" and devotional selections "How Great Thou Art," "Let There Be Peace on Earth" and "You Raise Me Up."
The latter song the family dedicated to President Gordon B. Hinckley, who was seated in the audience, as were other General Authorities.
In this sesquicentennial anniversary year of the departure of the first handcart companies, the centerpiece of the evening was a video tribute to these pioneers who gathered to Zion between the years 1856 and 1860. Scenes from an upcoming PBS documentary by Lee Groberg, Mark Goodman and Heidi Swinton, "Sweetwater Rescue" were augmented with choir and orchestra performances of an original score by Nathan Hofheins created expressly for the concert.
"Many of the pioneers traveled not by wagon train but by handcart," choir announcer Lloyd Newell said in his recorded narration, "a novel system employed to cut the costs of overland travel. Some 3,000 saints from the British Isles and Scandinavia came by handcart in those four years. The Perpetual Emigration Fund, established by Brigham Young in 1852, financed the $86-per-person cost which covered sail, rail and trail travel. For the most part these emigrating saints were poor. They were coal miners from Wales, textile workers from the English Midlands and laborers on someone else's land. They came west with little except the fire of Israel's God burning in their hearts."
The score drew primarily upon the well-known hymn of the gathering, "O Ye Mountains High."
Snippets from pioneer journals were voiced by actors, such as this from Sarah Hancock Beesley of the Rowley handcart company: "Mr. Beesley carried his violin with him, and we used it to gather and sing and listen to the music. The popular song was 'The Handcart Song'."
The presentation highlighted the drama of tragedy and suffering experienced by the Willie and Martin companies and the rescue that transpired by Church members directed by President Brigham Young to go and bring in the suffering saints.
"I've felt to rejoice greatly and give praise to God for my safe arrival in Zion," said James Blake, Martin Company, in dialogue featured in the presentation.
A tribute to the pioneers by President Hinckley, recorded on an earlier occasion, was shown at the conclusion of the presentation. "I've felt that we must never permit ourselves to lose sight of the great and singular achievements of those who first came to this valley in 1847," the Church president declared in the recorded tribute.
The concert concluded with Leroy J. Robertson's dramatic arrangement of William Clayton's famous pioneer anthem "Come, Come, Ye Saints."
At the concert opening, the orchestra performed the lively "Overture for a Celebration" composed by former Salt Lake Tabernacle Organist Robert Cundick. The choir and orchestra performed Mack Wilberg's arrangement of four American folk hymns and, following the Brett family set, built to a climax with soaring arrangements of "They, the Builders of the Nation," "Lead, Kindly Light," (featuring a violin solo by Igor Gruppman, the orchestra's accomplished conductor) and "Faith in Every Footstep," composed a decade ago by K. Newell Dayley for the Church's Pioneer Sesquicentennial.
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