It's been a busy spring for John Oliver, and not only musically. When I reach the guitarist at his Vancouver home, he's just come in from working on his garden, and he's got floral metaphors on his mind. "I guess when you plant a lot of different seeds, they may all come to bloom at the same time," he says of a season that has already seen him active as both a composer and a performer. "I'm just pushing forward on all fronts, and trying to make use of all my talents.

"I've always focused on writing music," he adds. "I love what you can achieve through writing a piece; you can create music that really can't be done any other way. But I missed the sort of real, tactile experience of playing and performing new music, so a number of years ago I started to play a lot more again and started some new projects up, so that's why I've been seen on-stage a lot recently."

In April, Oliver launched a collaboration with zheng [Chinese zither] virtuoso Mei Han, which he describes as "very successful".

"Mei's a star," he explains. "She's impeccable."

And on Saturday and Monday (May 8 and 10), Oliver will post another premiere: the debut of Up Wind , his first full-length commission for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. Presented in an Orpheum Theatre triple bill along with Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16 and Anton Dvorák's Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70 , Oliver's latest should be breezy fare for some, and revelatory torment for others.

As a guitarist who got his start playing in rock bands, Oliver readily divulges that the sustained high frequencies and difference tones of Up Wind 's second movement are an attempt to invoke the otherworldly squall of an electric guitar in full feedback mode, albeit through purely acoustic means.

"People who are used to listening to music in a traditional mode aren't going to know what that's about," he says, with a hint of anticipatory zeal. "My generation grew up with electric guitars, listening to recordings in the living room at high volume, so we know what this is all about....But the second movement, especially, will have a strident quality. It's written 'play as loud as you can play', in what's described in the orchestration books as 'the ugly register'."

Ugly or not, that the VSO is willing to present such a confrontational work on the same bill as two 19th-century classics indicates that both the orchestra and its listeners share a newfound willingness to give contemporary music a chance. It's a situation that can only bode well for Oliver and his peers.

"The fame of someone like Arvo Pí¤rt has set the stage for a great deal of real interest in new music and I don't at all mind being somewhere in the middle of that."