Don’t let anyone tell you that the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s Pacific Rim Celebration isn’t, first and foremost, a shrewd marketing move. Tying a festival of mostly contemporary Asian music to the Lunar New Year offers a way of reaching a growing demographic while addressing issues of aesthetic diversity and range. It’s also a way of showcasing some of the growing number of Asian-born instrumentalists now living in the Lower Mainland.

At the same time, though, VSO music director Bramwell Tovey hasn’t resorted to pandering in his quest to put multicultural bums in the Orpheum’s plush seats. The two nights of this year’s celebration—one devoted to Chinese music and musicians; the other focusing on Japan, with a bit of Ludwig van Beethoven for spice—look set to maintain the same high standards that the VSO has become known for under Tovey’s tenure.

Night one is perhaps the more adventurous program. The Chinese New Year–themed event on Saturday (February 28) finds guest conductor Perry So at the podium; at 32, he’s already built up an impressive résumé. Xian Xinghai’s cinematic The Yellow River Piano Concerto is one of the few lasting works of art to emerge from the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and Guilian Liu, who’ll solo on Zhao Jiping’s Pipa Concerto, is well known locally for her work with the exceptional quartet Red Chamber.

A Japanese Celebration, on Sunday (March 1), offers more familiar orchestral fare in the form of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, with Akiko Suwanai as the soloist, and Gustav Holst’s Japanese Suite, an early example of classical-music multiculturalism. Also featured will be four different Japanese choirs, koto soloist Yuriko Nariya, and, in an especially intriguing development, Japanese consul general Seiji Okada on electronic saxophone.

Whether Okada will be playing a Yamaha WX-5 or a Casio DH-100 remains to be seen, but we’re willing to bet that he’ll sound a lot better than the piano stylings of our own musically dubious head of state.