With soloist Vadim Gluzman. A Vancouver Symphony Orchestra presentation. At the Orpheum Theatre on Saturday, February 24. No remaining performances.

Last week, I did something I'd never done before: I led a standing ovation for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. Unfortunately, only a dozen other listeners leaped up with me, but never mind. Being right doesn't necessarily mean being popular.

Still, the local audience's lukewarm enthusiasm for violinist Vadim Gluzman's earth-shattering interpretation of Sofia Gubaidulina's Offertorium for Violin and Orchestra was puzzling. Yes, it's a conservative crowd, and there's no denying this is a difficult and often dissonant score. But Gluzman, whose violin shouldered the role of Christ in Gubaidulina's musical telling of the Passion, gave a performance that will be etched forever in the memory of those who understood it. His instrument sang in ecstasy, sobbed in self-doubt, shrieked under the lash of the bow, and finally offered up a Gnostic prayer of incredible tenderness. Even though I am no Christian, I was left breathless and overwhelmed by this sonic rendition of one of our culture's founding myths.

Even more remarkably, the VSO players were with Gluzman all the way. Spurred on by precise and animated instructions from music director Bramwell Tovey, the instrumentalists rose to the challenge of the intricate score and absolutely nailed each and every one of the many unconventional textures Gubaidulina uses to accompany her story. At points, the music splintered like saplings in a hurricane; elsewhere, the low brass and woodwinds produced the effect of a drowned landscape; at times, glorious waves of consonance rose through otherwise phantasmal sonorities.

By applying the compositional techniques of Anton Webern to a melodic fragment first embroidered by Johann Sebastian Bach, Gubaidulina has arrived at a work that exists out of time—and here it was given an appropriately timeless performance.

Gluzman was more conventionally brilliant in his concert-opening reading of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky's Souvenir d'un lieu cher (as orchestrated by Alexander Glazunov), which he played from memory and has obviously internalized. Similarly, the VSO could not be faulted for its bold take on Alexander Scriabin's rather overheated fourth symphony, The Poem of Ecstasy. But a placatory encore excerpted from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker was clearly uncalled for: having denied Gluzman his much-deserved ovation, this audience should have been sent to bed without dessert.