Harry Bicket may be the only musician who has hit the Twin Cities podium trifecta, conducting the Minnesota Orchestra, Minnesota Opera (most recently in "Orpheus and Eurydice") and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (the pit band for "Orpheus"). Artistic director of the English Concert (a top period-instruments ensemble) and former organist of Westminster Abbey, Bicket seems at home in almost any musical niche.

He's also got a knack for inventing illuminating programs. A culling of English pieces with the SPCO last season was a model of its kind; this week's compounding of baroque and contemporary works with the same orchestra is, if anything, better. Such celebrity-free programs, reconnoitering the fringes of the standard repertoire, can be a hard sell. But I'm confident that most listeners at Friday morning's Ordway Center concert went away elated.

Henry Purcell's extraordinary G-minor Chacony, in Benjamin Britten's string-orchestra transcription, began the proceedings, with Bicket leading from the harpsichord. The performance, made more telling by a touch of reserve, was riveting.

Next came "Tabula Rasa" ("Clean Slate," 1977), essentially a concerto for two violins by the Estonian master Arvo Pärt, who turned 75 last month. Economical of means, Pärt's music is hewn from silence. ("If you approach silence with love," he has said, "music may result.") His work, marked by a kind of meditative humility, is an antidote to the terminally distracted, 24/7 world of digitized chatter. (That world fought back Friday: a ringing cell phone intruded upon Pärt's last, whispered minute.) From their first silence-rending A's, four octaves apart, violinists Ruggero Allifranchini and Sunmi Chang seemed at one with the music's austere intensity.

Jean-Philippe Rameau was the greatest French musician of the 18th century. If the man was obstinate and irascible -- he berated the priest who gave him last rites -- his music is anything but. A suite from his 1763 opera, "Les Boréades," was effervescent, alive with wit and color; No. 9 in that suite (blandly listed in the printed program as "No tempo indicated") was simply ravishing. Bicket and colleagues simulated many of the flavors of a period band.

St. Louis Symphony principal cellist Daniel Lee, his sound luminous, was the soloist in James MacMillan's 1993 "Kiss on Wood," capturing the music's rhapsodic stillness. The work was to have been played by SPCO principal Ronald Thomas, but he, alas, is on medical leave for the entire season. We wish him well.

Larry Fuchsberg writes regularly about music.