Michael Ballam: Utah tenor's career comes full circle

He has sung Puccini and Wagner in the great concert halls of the world. He has sung at the Met, the White House, the Kennedy Center and the Vatican. He has sung with Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Birgit Nilsson and Joan Sutherland. But today Michael Ballam is appearing live! — at the Sunshine Terrace Rest Home in Logan, Utah.

Accompanied by his wife Laurie, four of his six children and the family dog, Tennessee, Ballam shakes hands with the residents and makes introductions and moves a woman in a wheelchair to give her a better view of the show.

"We've been coming here for years," he tells the gathering of about 60. "It's one of the highlights of the Christmas season for me."

Ballam plays the piano as he sings Christmas carols, either solos or duets with family members, for more than a half-hour, following a program he had printed for the occasion. Then come requests.

"That's my favorite thing about Michael," says Laurie. "He's done lots of dramatic things in his life with opera, but what touches me the most is that he is completely unselfish with people in need."

It is for such moments as this that Ballam returned to his roots and his hometown, although he would tell you it was an act of God that got him here. He literally lost his voice, and then found it again in hospitals and rest homes around the country.

A few years ago The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints actually created a position just for him: an at-large music missionary — a roving ambassador of goodwill, with a tenor voice.

"When I'm feeling low, it evaporates when I go in an intensive-care unit and sing for people for an afternoon," he says. "It's wonderful therapy. . . . There's something about singing for someone at their bedside."

Between rehearsals in strange cities, he might show up unannounced at a hospital, looking for someone to warm with his singing. After introducing himself to a patient, he asks if there is a song he would like to hear, and then he sings to an audience of one. With a repertoire of thousands of songs stored in his memory, he knows almost all requests, and if he doesn't, he'll learn it and come back the next day to perform it.

"I didn't make it back for one in time, so I sang it at his funeral," he says.

Once he visited a man in a rest home who nurses warned him was surly and rambunctious. The singer asked the man about his background and learned he was from Germany. Then Ballam belted out the man's favorite songs — in German — and the man sang along with him.