A Brooklyn Academy of Music Nextwave Festival presentation of a music and film show in two acts by Sufjan Stevens. Conductor, Michael Atkinson. Band: Casey Foubert, Yuuki Matthews, James McAlister, Sufjan Stevens, Shara Worden. Sufjan Stevens demonstrated tremendous technical proficiency and ambition in his latest performance — and his new “cinematic suite” simply made a lot of listeners very happy.

The ultra-hip Brooklyn Academy of Music commissioned Stevens’ fundamentally friendly work “The BQE,” an audiovisual treat performed by a 31-piece chamber orchestra and festooned with clever video, eye-watering costumes on its Hula-Hooping dancers and disco balls. After the roughly 30-minute journey (video explained that the song was moving from Queens to Brooklyn), Stevens stuck around the hall to play some of his best songs with occasional orchestral accompaniment.

It took 90 minutes for somebody to shout out a song request in the Howard Gilman Opera House, and it was clearly so embarrassing, it happened only once. Few indie pop singers would feel so at home in BAM’s sitting-room-only venue, but Stevens made a clear point with the moshless concert hall and the complex opening instrumental piece. See? He seemed to say.

You’re sitting quietly listening to an instrumental suite named after a really boring road (the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway), and you’re still having a good time. “The BQE” started slowly, with the orchestra performing in silhouette behind two separate scrims. At the top of the outer scrim, a three-part video screen (”B,” “Q,” “E,” it said at first) showed images of Queens — housetops and streets and inflatable gorillas — under a sweet, goofily epic score.