There's nothing like live music, as its marketers are forever reminding us. But sometimes it's tempting to stay home and pop a CD into the player.

Case in point: This week's St. Paul Chamber Orchestra program was conceived as a collaboration between current artistic partner Dawn Upshaw and former music director Dennis Russell Davies, and neither was at the Ordway Center on Thursday night. The concert was to feature the Twin Cities premiere of "Dances for Soprano and Chamber Orchestra" by 70-year-old Dutchman Louis Andriessen, lately feted at Carnegie Hall. But no.

Davies, grounded in Austria by ash from an Icelandic volcano, canceled first one and then the other of his two scheduled weeks with the SPCO.

The orchestra thus became part of a mad, volcano-powered scramble, as musicians across Europe and North America found themselves unable to honor their engagements and managers scurried to locate suitable subs. Rolodexes and their digital offspring were worked to exhaustion; text messages flew. From this melee, the SPCO emerged with German-born guest conductor Alexander Mickelthwate, music director of the Winnipeg Symphony. The orchestra replaced the piece by Andriessen (the one living composer on the bill) with one by Samuel Barber, whose centennial year has been too little observed in these parts.

When the house lights went down Thursday evening, the audience was informed from the stage that Upshaw had suffered an "allergic reaction" and could not perform. Her two pieces, Ravel's "Chansons madécasses" and Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," abruptly went the way of Andriessen. (Late word from the orchestra was that Upshaw would not appear Friday but hoped to sing Saturday.)

What to do?

Enter four doughty string players -- Steven Copes, Ruggero Allifranchini, Maiya Papach, Ronald Thomas -- who, as members of the string ensemble Accordo, happen to have played Brahms' C-minor String Quartet (Op. 51, No. 1) last week at the Southern Theater. They reprised the piece Thursday at the Ordway, wearing their SPCO hats.

And Mickelthwate? He made what he could of John Cage's uncharacteristic "The Seasons," a Davies holdover, and made considerably more of Beethoven's First Symphony, which was crisp, fleet and transparent, marred only by a slight metrical rigidity. He deserves another gig, under more propitious circumstances. And the orchestra deserves an A for resourcefulness under pressure.

Larry Fuchsberg writes regularly about music.