Musica Viva’s two big pieces by Shirish Korde, at Boston University’s Tsai Center last weekend, synthesized the music of at least four cultures with dance, song, mime, poetry, and puppet performance, also in multicultural styles. Sponsored by the FleetBoston Celebrity Series, the event configured music as visual and physical pleasure as well as something you listen to.

In his brief introduction to Blue Topeng, which was having its world premiere Saturday night, Korde described the stylistic mesh of his concerto for Balinese and Western instruments. Each of the musicians in the conventional chamber ensemble played a Balinese instrument as well — small metallophones, flute, gongs — but the soloists in the piece were Desak Made Suarti Laksmi and Bethany Collier, who moved around a little gamelan grouping of their own. The Balinese instruments are part of a gamelan made for Holy Cross College, where Korde heads the music department, and he explained that one of the metallophones and the trompong (a set of tuned brass bowls) had been built to play a chromatic scale in addition to its standard Balinese tuning. This unusual design made for more compatibility with the Western instruments.

With Musica Viva’s Richard Pittman conducting, Blue Topeng featured the flashy, unpredictable style of Balinese Kebyar, a slow movement with Balinese flute (suling), and a more sustained final movement where the solo women played interlocking rhythms along with drums, clarinet, flute and strings. Even jazz made its way into the agreeable mix. At one point, accompanied by the cello, Desak sang a chorus of " Mood Indigo " in a high wordless soprano.

Bali has long been a friendly intersection point for Eastern and Western arts. Back in the 1930s, the Canadian composer Colin McPhee made the first transcriptions of gamelan music into Western notation, and Blue Topeng at times reminded me of some of McPhee’s gamelan-influenced orchestral works.

Korde’s dance drama Chitra (first performed in 2000) turned from the rambunctious clang of the gamelan to the more melodic unfurling of sitar, voice, and tabla, which led the ensemble through a staged excerpt from the Hindu epic Mahabharata. Combining elements of Indian music and dance with Balinese dance and puppetry, Chitra dips into a tremendous, philosophical literature where mortals and deities meet, clash, fall in love, make mistakes, find their way home, deceive each other, die, resurface in other stories. At the end, the narrator apologized for stopping after only an hour.

Directed by Lynn Kremer, Chitra seemed less a narrative than a series of meditations on an unfolding relationship between the hunter god Arjuna and Chitra, a young woman raised to hunt and lead her tribe. The narrative stretches over a year’s time, debating the nature of male and female, desire and denial, competition and compatibility. At the end of the play, Chitra and Arjuna are happily united, but that’s probably not the end of the story.

Chitra was played by Tara Ahmed, who specializes in Kuchipudi-style Indian dance. Tall and slim, she walked with a spacious assurance, a stress into the ground on every step. Played by the Balinese mask dancer I Nyoman Catra, Arjuna had a wide, swaying walk and elbows-out gestures that made him seem even more imposing. When they encountered each other, it wasn’t just two different styles coming together but two different planes of existence.

They sparred with darting daggers but later circled each other in an erotic love scene. The phases of their courtship were observed by traditional Balinese shadow puppets — Catra is a master puppeteer as well as a dancer — and sometimes enacted in silhouette by the two dancers behind a screen. Only after the lovers had come to a new understanding of themselves and each other did they join in a celebratory unison dance.

The majestic soprano Elizabeth Keusch sat with the orchestra and told the story in English and Sanskrit, song and chant, sometimes commenting on the characters and offering counsel to the audience.

The production was beautifully designed (set by Ted Simpson, lighting by Joe Saint and costumes for actors and musicians by Kurt S. Hultgren), and I wish it had run for weeks. I could absorb its many elements only in one syncretic glimpse, and I grasped the music mainly as a vibrant backdrop. Keusch was wonderful, but there was so much to see — puppets, moving screens, a stylized mountain backdrop with another screen behind it, the actors and musicians in gorgeous intense colors, the instruments themselves. The whole panoply deserved to be spread out in a space big enough to match its expansive concept.