With the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. At the Orpheum Theatre on Saturday, March 27

For the devout parishioners in the time of Johann Sebastian Bach, Christ’s story was very real, as it was for Bach himself.

He wrote two magnificent extended works on the subject, The Passion According to Saint Matthew and The Passion According to Saint John.

Actually, he wrote five, but three are lost. The pair that survive are very different, the former dealing graphically with the events leading up to the Crucifixion and the latter mainly a contemplative reflection on what the Crucifixion meant. Present secularism has far from reduced the effect of either work, and it hasn’t dulled its reality as an inspired piece of music that continues to hold audiences.

The performance of the work better known as the St. John Passion at the Orpheum Theatre on March 27 joined the Vancouver Bach Choir and members of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. They were conducted by Bruce Pullan, in what was part of his rather prolonged “farewell season” after 27 years as the choir’s leader.

Though Pullan feels otherwise, the St. John is generally considered inferior to the St. Matthew. As well as being considerably shorter, it’s less coherent. Where it excels is in the powerful choruses, which are almost everything here, standing in for mockers and scourgers, then the most grief-stricken witnesses of the catastrophe, and ultimately projecting the audience’s emotion. The simple chorales, which the people of Bach’s time knew by heart, take the role of a figure in a Baroque religious painting who looks gravely out of the canvas and points at the tragedy, saying, “This happened.”

The performance was heartfelt, with turbae (“crowd scenes”) that evoked emotional storms, as they should, and well-paced—the St. John can feel long, but didn’t. Most of the soloists were excellent: a splendid evangelist in tenor Benjamin Butterfield, a vigorous Jesus in baritone Jeremy Bowes, a firm-toned Pilate in baritone Michael Robert-Broder, and a clear, agile soprano in Jane Long. Only mezzo Debi Wong was lacking in emotion.

The concert was a very decent gesture toward a selfless genius for whom God meant everything. After his death, more than 80 books on religion were found in Bach’s library. As he tersely summed up his career in words that don’t begin to say it, “I worked hard.”