New World Symphony with video from Tal Rosner; photo credit Rui Dias-Aidos.

In its glamorous new digs in the New World Center, the New World Symphony has decided this year to actively use those beautiful screens that frame that lovely stage with some commissioned video programs from international video artists. It’s a great statement for this young orchestra moving forward – NWS has always had an air of excitement around them, and this inclusion adds another hip element.

The first installment at the season opening on Oct. 5 came from Israeli filmmaker Tal Rosner, who made video to accompany Benjamin Britten’s “Four Seasons,” which ended up being videos of images of the four cities whose orchestras commissioned this work – Miami, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los Angeles – displayed on the large screens above the stage.

The second video-commissioned piece premiered on Oct. 17, from Netia Jones, to accompany the sprightly 1973 composition “Inverno in-ver” from Niccolo Castiglioni. It was lovely and evocative, not something that tried to mimic the music but complement it, which is exactly what should have happened.

Jones is a British filmmaker/director/designer maybe most famous for making the video backdrop to the operatic version of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” and is working now on a film for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 10th year-celebration for their Walt Disney Concert Hall, designer by Frank Gehry. He also, of course, designed Miami’s New World Center.

The overhead screens were in fact sparsely used during “Inverno.” Smaller screens, in rectangular and triangular irregular sizes set right behind the orchestra, were the focus of the projections. Jones created soft, beautiful – and cold – images of frozen tree branches, snow flakes, snow-covered woods, jewel-like scenes of forests blanketed in white and ice-silver. There was very little spectrum of color, like is so often the case when a snow-storm demands that a world turns almost two-toned – the blinding white on one end, the other colors that manage to make it through on the other almost singularly muffled and dark.

But the music and the imagery were never somber. There was anticipation, like when one first walks out into a snow-canapéd land. Electric, and it twinkled. To works that were titled  “The Flowers of Ice” and “The Frozen Lake,” Jones made flowing imagery that never bordered on what could be fateful for such an endeavor, that is trying to “animate” a symphony. As the orchestra produced sounds that chimed, chirped and sounded crisp (directed by Michael Tilson Thomas), the visuals on the screens placed right behind them seemed to simply follow – these woods were lovely, dark and deep, but not too intrusive.

For further concerts at New World Center, including video events, visit www.nws.edu.