The iconic cubes on the back wall and ceiling of Orchestra Hall are getting a shot of high-tech video and lighting design, with BAFTA-winning Tal Rosner using them as his canvas.

For the Minnesota Orchestra’s season opener, the London-based designer is creating a visual landscape to accompany the orchestra’s performance of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” part of the orchestra’s new multi-year series, “Sound Unbound,” developed around collaborations with visual artists.

“The Firebird” was written in 1910 for the Ballets Russes — the Paris-based company of Russian dancers, many drawn from St. Petersburg’s Imperial Ballet, that producer Sergei Diaghilev built into Europe’s most influential dance company of the era. It marked an early step toward a new style of modernist music that fully arrived three years later with “The Rite of Spring,” a piece whose premiere caused quite a brouhaha with its scandalous break from the musical styles of the past.

For the Minnesota Orchestra’s performance, Rosner is using video mapping — a technique that precisely incorporates an architectural space into the animation — to tell the folklore story of Prince Ivan’s encounter with the evil sorcerer Koschei, his escape with the help of a magical Firebird, and diversions that include a game involving golden apples with 12 princesses.

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His design tightly follows the original choreography, but his style is suggestive and metaphorical. “I don’t show the princesses, but the princesses are represented by golden ribbons,” Rosner said. Audiences who know the choreography will recognize the precise beats he’s drawing on, but prior knowledge is not a requirement, he said.

“I think that it’s still very communicative because I’m following the rhythms and the colors and what is suggested,” Rosner said. “It’s a very simple tale, and with quite a lot of theme and variation, but it was really wonderful to be able to work with a piece that has such a strong, visual association and do something that feels coherent to the original story, but also coherent in its own new structure.”

Rosner comes from a musical family — his brother is a composer, his father ran a conservatory — but he studied communication design and media, aiming for a career in television graphics. “My dream was to work for MTV,” Rosner told me. Later, he would explore creating designs for theater productions and has enjoyed collaborating with orchestras, in part because a music concert provides a kind of blank slate for a video designer.

“If you work with an orchestral piece,” Rosner noted, “the scope of what you can do and the canvas to do it on is much bigger.”

Rosner is collaborating closely with the orchestra’s in-house lighting crew to manage the pacing, the visual ups and downs, and the precise cueing. He attributes this team approach to an artistic maturity that rejects individual ego. “As the years progressed, I’m much more aware of everyone else on the team,” Rosner said. “It’s not just like, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ Now it’s a much more holistic approach.”

Rosner called working with the cubes “serendipity.” “Having this constraint enabled me to approach it from all these mad and new ways, and I have to say that this is a piece that is going to be impossible to replicate anywhere else,” he said.

The cubes were integral to the design. “Almost every design decision I made is rooted in the fact that the cubes are the projection surface,” Rosner said. “All the design elements are in constant consideration of the layout of the cubes, so the mapping is very, very, very accurate.”

The Minnesota Orchestra performs “Firebird” alongside George Walker’s 2004 piece, “Icarus in Orbit” as well as Sergei Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 2 in G minor for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 16, featuring pianist Vadym Kholodenko, conducted by music director Thomas Søndergård. The performances are at 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 25, and 7 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 26, at Orchestra Hall, 1111 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis. ($64-$159). More information here.

Also playing: “Waiting for Godot” at the Guthrie

On the other side of downtown, the Guthrie Theater is staging a production of another modern classic from the 20th-century: Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play, “Waiting for Godot,” directed by the Guthrie’s artistic director Joseph Haj.

Beckett didn’t leave much wiggle room in his script for interpretation, marking every pause, silence and stage direction mandatory for future theater artists who wanted to put on the play. Yet Haj and the cast breathe new life into the text, embracing its dire minimalism and asking how its existential dread hits in our oversaturated, hyper polarized world.

Beckett wrote “Godot” in the wake of the world’s fight against fascism, during his own years in the French Resistance. Now, as the world confronts fascism in a new form — what Naomi Klein has called “end times fascism” — the play’s central image feels newly urgent: two men, desperately grasping at their last strands of hope. “Godot” asks the question, how do we keep hope alive when the world seems so bleak?

When I watched the show on opening night, there was a small line flub between David Strathairn and Jimmy Kieffer, playing Vladimir and Estragon, respectively. It was noticeable because Beckett’s rhythms and language are so exact. But soon they were back on track, finding a magnetic chemistry with each other.

Kieffer brings his signature lovability as a comic actor into the role, holding his own against the star power of Strathairn (known for his work in films like “Sneakers” and “Good Night and Good Luck.”) William Sturdivant, meanwhile, balances Pozzo’s brutality and pompousness, and Jim Lichtscheidl aptly delivers Lucky’s absurdist monologue at the heart of the play. And yet, while it is an ensemble show, Strathairn’s gravitas kicked in during the second act, allowing the audience to feel the ache of his character’s existential plight.

The strong performances are backed by Darron L. West’s immersive sound design, creating a terrifying sense of immediacy.

Between the two, it’s a good week to be reminded why these 20th-century innovations still invite a disquieting stir.

The Guthrie performs “Waiting for Godot” at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesday Sept. 23, at 7: 30 p.m. Thursday, Sept 24, and Friday, Sept. 25, and at 1 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 26, and at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 27, through Oct. 11 ($25-$91). More information here.