It features a miraculous resurrection, answered prayers, and chariots of fire, but the one thing the Vancouver Bach Choir’s Elijah doesn’t have is an ophicleide. Felix Mendelssohn’s score for the 1846 oratorio actually calls for a pair of the unusual brass instruments, but VBC music director Leslie Dala doubts he’ll be able to fill that request.

“And I haven’t really tried, either!” he admits with a laugh, in a telephone conversation from his Vancouver home. “We’ll get it close to what he [Mendelssohn] asked for, but I have a feeling it’s going to be the tuba, in this case.”

Neither the Bach Choir singers nor their audience will necessarily feel shortchanged. In addition to the support of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and four top vocal soloists, Elijah involves what Dala describes as an “epic” score.

“As we’ve been rehearsing it, I’ve been marvelling at the detail and the care that Mendelssohn took in setting the text, and also in tying the whole piece together,” he explains. “There’s a handful of motifs that keep coming back—and sometimes it’s almost Wagnerian in that sense, but this is pre-Wagner. He uses a ‘curse’ motif, just like Alberich has in Das Rheingold, but Mendelssohn does it first. It’s this diminished fifth interval that comes right at the beginning of the piece, and anytime there’s any sort of dark or menacing thing going on, you can be certain that that interval—which is known as the diabolus in musica, the devil in music—is around. It sounds like almost a cliché, but he really does use it in a masterful way.”

Elijah was adventurous in its time, and it would be easy to make parallels between Julius Schubring’s libretto and things that are going on today. The drought in Israel that the titular prophet brings to an end through the power of prayer could be compared to the lack of rain in our latter-day Promised Land, California, while Elijah’s ascent to heaven in a fiery cart is clearly a precursor to what fundamentalist Christians call the Rapture.

“Like any significant piece, I think it speaks to different people in different ways,” says Dala, when asked whether he chose Elijah for its contemporary echoes. “With people who are churchgoers, who are believers, I think the story resonates with something that’s been repeated often throughout their lives. For other people, Elijah is a mythological figure who’s really interesting, in a certain way. And at the same time, it’s a hopeful piece; for something that begins with such dire prophecies of doom, it does end with this feeling that all is okay for today.

“But I have to admit that I didn’t think about any of that when I programmed this,” he continues. “It just happens to be one of the top 10 oratorios, it’s been a decade since it’s been done here, and the choral writing is spectacular.”

The Vancouver Bach Choir presents Elijah at the Orpheum on Saturday (March 28).