ORONO – With no snow on the ground Sunday afternoon, it was easy to think of spring, especially during the life-giving concert staged by the Bangor Symphony Orchestra.

Korean-born Michelle Kim, who has taken her talents as a pianist around the world, fairly pounced on Saint-Saens’ Concerto, Piano No. 4, during her appearance at the Maine Center for the Arts.

The melodic piece showed the full range of both Kim’s abilities and the piano as instrument, especially during the ample portions of allegro.

It seemed appropriate that Kim, who started playing at age 4, was performing the works of the French composer, who could play all of Beethoven’s sonatas by age 10.

The audience responded most warmly to Kim’s passionate offering, as well as to her follow-up with Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s lively “Grand Tarantelle.” Those situated to watch Kim’s fingers fly over the keys could easily visualize the spider referred to in the title.

The “Surprise” of the afternoon referred to a moment during Haydn’s Symphony No. 4, a percussive chord that pops up in the quiet of the second movement. The chord has perhaps been overbilled as “fortissimo,” but the concerto stands on its own just fine.

The first three pieces in the concert were performed with a smaller portion of the orchestra’s brass and woodwind sections, musicians who certainly made their mark even when the strings were front and center.

But the full orchestra was unquestionably the star during the well-chosen final performance, Richard Strauss’ Tod und Verklaerung, op. 24, “Death and Transfiguration.”

Strauss was but 25 when he finished the stirring piece, which movingly follows a man’s dying recollection of childhood, his death and subsequent transfiguration.

From tympani to strings, the orchestra led off with the rhythm of the fading heartbeat, moving on to a dreamlike state of nostalgia.

Collision and crescendos marked the dying – no slipping off gently here – concluding with the resonance of the gong.

And then, yes. Joy, the new life that can come from dying. As Strauss himself put it, “the soul leaves the body, in order to find perfected in the most glorious form in the eternal cosmos that which he could not fulfill here on Earth.”

On Sunday, the Bangor Symphony Orchestra fulfilled Strauss’ vision here on Earth.