If you closed your eyes and listened, it could have been a circus in full, noisy swing. Or elephants rhythmically walking across the plains. Once, it even sounded like someone zipping a whistle of air through an empty straw.

But it was the Bangor Symphony Orchestra showing its varietal talents at Sunday’s classical concert at the Maine Center for the Arts. Those talents, guided by the lively and exacting baton of music director Christopher Zimmerman, stretched beyond intriguing little musical tricks and well into solid, and often quite entertaining, music making.

Billed as a “jamboree,” the program was an unusual collection of provocative music beginning with Igor Stravinsky’s Suites Nos. 1 and 2 for Small Orchestra. What a delightfully witty set of eight miniatures! Plinks, oompahs, sizzles and flutters played in bright, crisp styles were simply hilarious, and elicited both laughter and a sense of light-hearted fun. Difficult those these pieces surely were for the musicians, it was a playground of scintillating sounds and fascinating music for the listeners.

Maurice Ravel’s “Ma Mere L’Oyle,” or “Mother Goose,” shifted the mood to a more dreamy and sensual tone. The orchestra beautifully combined the innocence of nursery music with the experience of fairy-tale morals learned through such characters as Sleeping Beauty, Tom Thumb, and Beauty and the Beast — all of whom make musical appearances in this appealingly romantic piece. Jara Goodrich on harp and Tony Cyrus on contrabassoon certainly helped create the magic, but the entire orchestra was at its best with this enchanted series of musical stories.

Composer Martin Bresnick, of Connecticut, attended the concert and introduced his composition, “Angelus Novus,” a stormy, tragic orchestral piece on the second half of the program. With its nearly cacophonous blaring, this wild meditation on the expulsion from Paradise hurled chaotic sounds. Then it settled into a sad strain of remorseful strings and plaintive trumpet before ending with a blur of alarm — like a train coming through a sleeping town in the middle of the night.

The work reached deep into a primordial wreckage of sound that, thankfully, lasted under 10 minutes. The performance was a complete success, but any more (and Bresnick might agree with this) would have been unbearable.

Antonin Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances, Op. 72 closed the concert with swaying rhythms and dance tempos. After the taxing pieces that preceded this work, the musicians kept up admirable energy. They did, however, seem more strained during the Dvorak, and although no one could fault them technically, there was a certain flash — so essential to the folk tradition — that could have given the performance more verve.