Featuring the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bramwell Tovey. At the Roundhouse Community Centre on Sunday, April 2

Because no one bothered to pull the backstage curtain shut before the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra's April 2 performance at the Roundhouse Community Centre, all the impedimenta of concert production were exposed: scaffolding, extra music stands, shipping containers, and two giant trapezoidal bass cases. But this cluttered backdrop proved an oddly perfect setting for a show in which the VSO's strings were nakedly revealed, shorn of horns, woodwinds, and percussion.

The night opened on a high note-indeed, one that was never surpassed-with the Uzbeki-Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin's Zoom and Zip, a fast-paced thriller. Imagine a Gypsy dance that grew up and went to art school, then dropped out to become a busker. That's what this tough yet ingratiating introduction sounded like, and it sounded great.

Now imagine Kats-Chernin's attitude gone, replaced by shimmering sheets of harmonics and a civilized conversation for violin and cello. That's the volte-face the VSO players were required to make in order to perform local composer Jocelyn Morlock's Solace, and once again the musicians demonstrated their sublime competence.

This piece almost demands an anthropomorphic interpretation, with VSO concertmaster Mark Fewer's violin taking the role of some avian songster, a lark or nightingale, and Zoltan Rozsnyai's cello playing the yearning human heart.

With music this fine, the last-minute addition of Philip Glass's Company proved an unnecessary bonus. The best thing that can be said of this short work, intended to accompany the Samuel Beckett prose-poem of the same name, is that it's aptly uneventful.

The post-intermission selections were not quite as gripping as the first two, but considerably more interesting than Company's empty formalism. Serge Arcuri's Episodes was strangely romantic coming from a composer better known for his electroacoustic work. While cynics might describe John Adams's Shaker Loops as 15 minutes of sighing and fluttering followed by a Puritan hoedown, a five-minute meditation on a rusty hinge, and yet more droning, even they might be transfixed by Tovey's gutsy conducting and his troupe's sensuous expertise.