A Nu:BC Collective presentation. At the Roundhouse Community Arts Centre on Saturday, February 17

It's a good idea: mixing contemporary music with other, more readily assimilated idioms like dance or film. But in the Nu:BC Collective's maiden outing, last October, the combinations were regrettably lopsided. The playing was impeccable from start to finish, but the nonmusical aspects seemed gratuitous—or even astoundingly amateurish.

This second time around, however, the Nu:BC programmers finessed the blend and came up with a delightfully diverse evening of sights and sounds.

As might be expected from an ensemble of UBC music-faculty members, the playing was again spot-on. Violist David Harding's milk-shake-thick tones made Dorothy Chang's astringent Streams a surprisingly sensual experience, while flutist Paolo Bortolussi, cellist Eric Wilson, and pianist Corey Hamm navigated the subaqueous atmospheres of George Crumb's Vox Balaenae with ease.

But it was the more truly multimedia works that made this such a captivating program. Nu:BC's decision to open with Benjamin Wilson's computer-generated Wee Polygons was a wise one: with no live musicians on-stage, the piece highlighted new forms of virtuosity—but Wilson's hissing, slippery sounds and off-kilter skyscraper images also paid homage to futurist notions of art first put forward nearly a century ago.

In contrast, a dazzling performance of five excerpts from Gyí¶rgy Ligeti's lengthy Etudes for solo piano used much simpler means: one pianist, one piano, and one dancer. That the dancer was Ballet B.C. alumna Emily Molnar, however, meant that the choreography was on par with Ligeti's famously thorny score. Molnar matched her movements to the music with near-scientific precision, yet her work also contained an almost improvisational edge—a fabulous marriage of direct emotional response and sustained intellectual effort.

Video artist jamie griffiths also excelled with her filmic accompaniment to John Adams's Road Movies for violin and piano. Her lovely, fluid images of birds, water, cityscapes, and pilgrims at the shrine of the Virgin Mary in southern Turkey packed tremendous emotional power, fully honouring the Nu:BC troupe's desire to take its listeners on a spellbinding, and groundbreaking, journey.