When surgery calls, song takes second place—and that’s why the Vancouver Chamber Choir’s upcoming Good Friday concert, The Love That Moves the Universe, isn’t going to be quite as loving as first intended. Soprano Mary Wilson’s illness forced a program shift: instead of the American soprano singing George Frederick Handel’s Laudate pueri Dominum, a luminous ode to Creation, the VCC will tackle the more purely choral Dixit Dominus, from the same composer.

The new addition is all about divine wrath, not divine love, but concertgoers need not worry about being unnecessarily hectored. According to the choir’s long-serving leader, Jon Washburn, the musical content has not changed radically.

“I’ve always tried to program not on a religious basis, but on a musical basis,” he says, in a telephone interview from his Mount Pleasant home.

In this instance, Dixit Dominus and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Jesu, meine Freude will serve to anchor the piece that gives the program its title, Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer’s otherworldly The Love That Moves the Universe. “Whenever I do something contemporary I like to add something more classic, for that side of our audience,” Washburn notes. “That seems to usually work really well.”

It could be argued, however, that the Schafer piece is well on its way to becoming a classic in its own right. Commissioned to mark the chamber choir’s 40th anniversary, The Love That Moves the Universe won appropriately universal acclaim when it was premiered in 2010, and Washburn did not want to wait too long to bring it back. Its appeal, he adds, lies partly in the fact that while it is cosmic in tone and scope, it’s not nearly as out-there as some of Schafer’s earlier work.

“The text is Dante, from the Paradiso—towards the end of that book—and there are places in the music where Schafer really falls into an Italian sound,” Washburn explains. “It’s almost like he’s channelling [17th-century composer Claudio] Monteverdi or something, and there are some exceedingly beautiful spots. The harmonies just have that sort of Monteverdian flavour to them, and it’s fascinating how he makes that work within the more experimental context of the rest of the music. But this is a mature piece, and his mature style is much less experimental than it used to be.”

Although Schafer has had a long association with the VCC—“His work is really the most important repertoire that we do,” Washburn says—this particular composition emerged without much external input. “I asked him to write the piece, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, sure. I’ll do that,’ ” the VCC conductor and artistic director says with a laugh. “And then I talked to him a couple of months later, and said, ‘Oh, and I want to talk to you about the parameters for the piece.’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes. l’ll send you the first draft. It’s just done.’ This was, like, a year before the deadline, so I guess he just had an inspiration and wrote it right away.”

Schafer did apparently include the choir’s 40th-anniversary celebrations in his calculations. The Love That Moves the Universe is scored for 20 voices and 20 instrumentalists—and in this production the singers and players will also be deployed in an unusual manner.

“It’s like a 40-part motet, because each performer has a separate part,” Washburn notes. “And what we do is that it’s a big semicircle around the perimeter of the stage, alternating singers and players. I think that’s because of his concept of Dante’s circles of heaven and circles of hell. There are all of these gestures that go around the stage like a circle. In fact, I’d love to do a full circle around the audience. I think that would be fascinating—but you can’t do that in the Orpheum, so instead we’ll do the big semicircle. It’s quite stunning in terms of sound, and it’s so different visually as well.”

The work, Washburn adds, is a sonic as well as a spiritual journey. “It starts in a kind of stasis of sounds,” he says. “There is this C that is repeated over and over again every two measures, and there are these wonderful arpeggios that are built out of that C, and the music just sits there like the cosmos. And then he moves into the main text. I guess the direction the piece takes is, like most choral pieces, determined by the text, but he goes through some wonderful textural sounds, and then he breaks into these little bits of four-part harmony that have that Monteverdian cast. And when it gets to the end there are three soloists in different parts of the half-circle who do this ethereal high soprano thing which is accompanied by three bells, or crotales. It’s just a magic, shimmering sound that he achieves—and it just leaves you absolutely elated, it’s so gentle and beautiful.”

A better way of honouring the real rites of spring, whether Christian or cosmic, is hard to imagine.

The Vancouver Chamber Choir presents The Love That Moves the Universe at the Orpheum on Friday (March 25).