The length of a Wagner opera at four hours, Mendelssohn’s Elijah was nonetheless a great success at its Birmingham premiere in 1846. Since then its heavyweight storytelling has become much loved by choral societies up and down the land. All of which may have contributed towards a feeling that Elijah is more exciting to sing than it is to hear. But if anyone could convince me otherwise, it would surely be Eynsham Choral Society, with its infectiously enthusiastic approach to everything it tackles. Especially as it had cut the work down to a mere two hours.

From the fateful opening moment when Elijah himself proclaims: “There shall not be dew nor rain these years”, conductor Alison Wilson placed the work in its historical context. There were traces of Handel, Haydn, and Bach – especially Bach, the aria It is enough! was plainly influenced by the St Matthew Passion, which Mendelssohn himself had only recently rescued from obscurity.

“I feel I have to be muscular,” a member of the chorus remarked to me during the interval. It was an excellent description of the singing, with lines like “Take all the prophets of Baal and let not one of them escape us”, and “He shall perish!” being punched out with loud and clear feeling. Mendelssohn provides many meaty entries for all four choral parts, and they were eagerly seized by the 90-strong choir. If individual musical strands seemed to go astray occasionally, then this merely added to the feeling of a big, excitable crowd. Certainly conductor Wilson scrupulously prevented the music from wallowing in Victorian romanticism.

Similarly, soloists Siona Stockel, Bridget Budge, Hugh Wilson, Gwion Thomas, and boy soprano Samuel Wilson were uniformly strong and dramatic, while the orchestra plainly relished Mendelssohn’s descriptive scoring – underneath the words “Lo there came a fiery chariot” for instance. Altogether, Eynsham Choral did its very best to turn me into an Elijah fan.