This week's Minnesota Orchestra concerts inaugurated "Crash! Bang! Boom!" a three-week percussion festival. This event demonstrated the orchestra's great sense of fun. Audiences entering the Orchestra Hall lobby were greeted by a stunning assortment of percussion performances, setting an appropriately festive mood. The centerpiece of the concert was a suite from Georges Bizet's opera "Carmen," orchestrated by Rodion Shchedrin and premiered in 1967. Though it was conceived as a ballet, Shchedrin rearranges the numbers in the score, even adding works by Bizet not from "Carmen." But most of the big tunes, like Carmen's Habanera, Don Jose's Flower Song and the Toreador Song, are included.

The unique arrangement eliminates all winds and brass, scoring for strings and more than 50 percussion instruments. Timpanist Peter Kogan and four percussionists, Minnesota Orchestra members Brian Mount, Jason Arkis and Kevin Watkins, along with guest Fernando Meza, excelled.

This was a tour de force for the percussionists. Some individual moments were startling, even jarring, but this orchestration gave the music an added rhythmic vitality that was entirely appropriate. Some of the effects, featuring marimbas, cowbells, castanets and chimes, might be considered a little cheesy, but Bizet's masterpiece can easily withstand this treatment. Only the terminally stuffy would fail to enjoy the more tongue-in-cheek moments.

The rest of the program featured more serious Russian works. The concert opened with Mikhail Glinka's stirring overture to his opera "Ruslan and Ludmila." His introduction to the Pushkin fairy tale is rich in folk melody, but also in sophisticated orchestration. Music director Osmo Vänskä led the orchestra in the kind of rousing rendition that made one wish that the entire opera had followed.

The evening concluded with Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 3 in A minor. Though written in the 1930s, in the United States, it is a quintessentially late Romantic symphony and, in its themes, a thoroughly Russian one.

It is lush and inventive, flirting with bombast and yet quirky in many of its episodes. Vänskä captured the overall sense of drama, yet also excelled in the individual moments, showing off the orchestra, including the percussionists, in the eccentric bits of orchestration.

This program got "Crash! Bang! Boom!" off to an invigorating start. The rest of the festival promises even more adventurous programming, featuring a family of musicians who rarely get to take center stage.

William Randall Beard is a Minneapolis writer.