There’s something surreal about watching a symphony orchestra decked out in iterations of green and white playing Prokofiev and Mendelssohn, but even if clothes make the man, they don’t make (or unmake) the concert, and the Regina Symphony Orchestra gave another terrific performance Saturday night at the Conexus Arts Centre.

The highlight was Prokofiev’s “Second Piano Concerto,” considered one of the most difficult pieces of piano music ever composed — and yet, so well played by soloist Hung-Kuan Chen that if conductor Victor Sawa hadn’t told the audience how difficult it was they might not have suspected it — unless they were among the half of the crowd who could see Chen’s fingers flying up and down the keyboard at a speed that might have made you suspect a camera trick in a filmed performance.

It’s a cliche, after a concert on a chilly Saskatchewan night, to say something about the performer heating things up inside despite the world outside having turned prematurely white.

But if there were ever a performer to whom that cliche was perfectly suited, it would have to be Robert Michaels, the Juno Award-winning guitarist who joined forces with the Regina Symphony Orchestra for Saturday’s Flamenco Fire concert, the first in this year’s Shumiatcher Pops Series.

From the opening number, it was easy to imagine, as Maestro Victor Sawa suggested, that you were sitting in Spain’s Sierra Nevada mountains sipping sangria as the sun set. Though the repertoire ranged from original compositions by Michaels to a traditional Neopolitan love song, the Mason Williams hit “Classical Gas,” and the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” it all had that Flamenco feel, full of fire, frenetic finger work, dramatic chords and melancholy progressions.

For every form of music there are purists who say of certain practitioners, “That’s not really (whatever form of music they’re a purist in).”

Guitarist Robert Michaels admits Flamenco purists might say the same about Flamenco Fire, the concert he’ll perform with the Regina Symphony Orchestra on Saturday.

But the man the Ottawa Sun once dubbed “Flamenco’s version of Led Zeppelin axe-god Jimmy Page” is OK with that.

Saturday’s high-energy show, he says, is “a cross of different styles, everything from Flamenco to Cuban sounding music, as well as Brazilian, even a bit of Italian.” But it’s all infused with Michaels’s Flamenco style.

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The set of people who like both symphony orchestras and screaming guitars is generally thought of as small, but based on Guitar Heroes, Saturday’s Regina Symphony Orchestra Shumiatcher Pops concert featuring Jack Semple, it’s at least as large as the seating capacity of the Conexus Arts Centre.

Semple often plays with the RSO when a guitarist is required, but this was the first time he’s been front-and-centre for an entire concert, and the result was spectacular.

Read the whole thing.

More about the Regina Symphony Orchestra.

More about Jack Semple.

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Most electric guitar players don’t get much opportunity — if any — to play with a symphony orchestra.

Most electric guitar players aren’t Jack Semple, who’s headlining the Regina Symphony Orchestra’s final Shumiatcher Pops concert of the year, Guitar Heroes, on Saturday at the Conexus Arts Centre.

“I’ve been really fortunate in the last few years,” Semple says. “They’ve been using me on their Oscars shows and Pops shows and Mozart in the Meadow and stuff.

“There are so many brilliant musicians in the orchestra,” he adds. “It’s like going to school. I’ve learned what the orchestra can do.”

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What do you program for the final masterworks concert of the 100th season of a symphony orchestra?

It would be hard to improve on the Regina Symphony Orchestra’s answer to that question: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Every movement has iconic moments, and (in my opinion) if Beethoven had written nothing else in his life but the final movement, it would have been enough.

Halfway through the second half of the Regina Symphony Orchestra’s 10th annual The RSO Goes to the Oscars movie-music concert, Maestro Victor Sawa commented on the versatility of movie composers, who may find themselves writing theme music for sharks in one movie and mood music for superheroes in the next.

But it wasn’t just the composers’ versatility on display Saturday night — the RSO once again proved that it can tackle any style of music with verve.

It may have helped that superheroes Batman (on timpani) and Iron Man (on viola) were lending a hand, on a night that also saw a family dressed as characters from The Wizard of Oz win the costume competition at intermission.

Here’s a bit from the middle:

For Sawa, switching from symphonies to soundtracks is natural.

In a strange way, he says, “we owe a debt of gratitude to the Nazis. Oscar Hammerstein, Max Steiner, Eric Korngold, Bernard Hermann, Franz Waxman — they all came over because they were being persecuted in Europe.

“The entire Hollywood sound was created by the classical composers of Europe.

“When we talk about classical music and how it survived the second half of the 20th century, everyone was going to the movies, they were listening to classical music.

“The snob factor is missing when you go to the movies.”

And today’s movie composers are just as good as those early ones, Sawa says.

“The modern-day ones learned from the best.”