The music of David Bowie has been performed by orchestras before, but never quite the way Brent Havens presents it. When the arranger and conductor comes to the Orpheum to lead the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra through a performance of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s songs, don’t expect a cerebral experience like the one you might have listening to the Philip Glass symphonies based on Bowie’s albums Low and “Heroes”.

“Philip Glass likes to do some reinterpretations of things, do his own version of them,” Havens tells the Straight in a telephone interview. “We’re doing the version that everybody knows so that they can come in and sing the tunes right off the bat. They don’t have to wait 45 seconds or two minutes and go, ‘What tune is that? Oh, wait, I know that. There’s a melody I recognize.’ ”

Havens promises that The Music of David Bowie will be a crowd-pleasing affair, complete with a rock ensemble and a commanding frontman who possesses megawatt star power and a voice to match. That frontman is Tony Vincent. If you don’t recognize him from Season 2 of The Voice, you might know Vincent as a bona fide Broadway star; he originated the key role of St. Jimmy in American Idiot and starred as Judas Iscariot in the 2000 revival of Jesus Christ Superstar.

This isn’t Vincent’s first time stepping into an iconic rocker’s shoes. He took the lead role in Queen and Ben Elton’s musical We Will Rock You in its original West End production, and even performed with the band Queen for the actual Queen at Buckingham Palace.

Compared to navigating the vocal pyrotechnics of Freddie Mercury, Vincent says, tackling Bowie’s repertoire is less challenging, at least on a purely technical level. Reached at home in New York City, the singer notes that he grew up on the Thin White Duke, whose music had an immeasurable impact on his own songwriting. When pressed to name his favourite selection from Bowie’s astonishing 50-year career, Vincent picks “Ashes to Ashes”, a song he admits he finds difficult to sing, but for personal reasons rather than musical ones.

“The content of that lyric resonates with me in such a deep way,” he says of the 1980 single. “There isn’t a more personal song to me in his catalogue—that sort of monkey-on-your-back, addictive kind of behaviour, and the struggle to get away from that. It’s something that rings true to my past, and it’s something that I really connect with. Frequently, it’s an emotional song to get through, because it hits a little too close to home.”

Vincent isn’t the only one who finds relevance in Bowie’s work. He says the rock legend—who died in January at the age of 69—touched on universal themes. In particular, humanity’s eternal striving to receive, and divine meaning from, some great, elusive cosmic message—a quest that informed nearly all of Bowie’s work, from “Starman” to “Blackstar”.

“What makes his music so enjoyable to people, apart from him reinventing himself over and over and over again, is that there’s a lyrical content of this sort of searching and longing, and looking for something that’s out there that’s bigger than us as the human race, basically,” Vincent reflects. “And I think that sort of melancholy feel touched a lot of people. I know it did me, personally.”

The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra presents The Music of David Bowie at the Orpheum on Wednesday (October 5).