A well-designed concert program harnesses the tensions between its constituent pieces, and this weekend's mostly Russian St. Paul Chamber Orchestra program, masterfully led by Hans Graf, does no less. Presented in contrasting pairs -- Shostakovich's Op. 83a Chamber Symphony and his Second Piano Concerto before intermission, Giya Kancheli's "Night Prayers" and Prokofiev's Sinfonietta after -- the scores seemed eager to regroup themselves, with the harrowing and grief-stricken (the Chamber Symphony and "Night Prayers") allied against the mocking and manic (the concerto and Sinfonietta).

A native of Georgia, living in the West since 1991, Kancheli (born 1935) is a demon-haunted poet in a desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape. His slow-moving music, which has absorbed materials as various as Georgian folk melodies and cool jazz, sometimes risks inaudibility, sometimes erupts in shattering fortissimos that, in his words, "peel the paint from the ceiling."

Despite Friday morning's restless audience, "Night Prayers," performed on a darkened stage in a version for clarinet (the superb Timothy Paradise), tape and strings, left me shaken; especially unforgettable was the entry, near the end, of a boy's voice -- "to remind us," says the composer, "of the voices of angels we have never heard."

Shostakovich's Op. 83a is an orchestration of his Fourth String Quartet by violist/conductor Rudolf Barshai (still active at 85). Although the purist in me prefers the original, the arrangement is done with such skill that I'm glad to know both. The final movement, saturated with the Jewish folk music which for Shostakovich symbolized human defenselessness, is particularly telling.

I get a bipolar hit from Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2. Can the liquid Andante, redolent of Rachmaninoff, be taken at face value? Does it belong between those turbocharged outer movements? Kirill Gerstein, the fleet-fingered soloist, didn't resolve these questions, but was dynamic and droll, as the moment demanded.

Prokofiev's idiosyncratically neoclassic Sinfonietta is destined to remain an outlier. But if it replaced the composer's "Classical" Symphony just one time in 10, the world would be a better place.

An Austrian applauded for his Mozart, Graf, who turned 60 in February, might seem an odd choice for so Russo-centric a program. But he studied conducting at the Leningrad Conservatory and married a Russian -- and his affinity for this music is unmistakable. The orchestra played brilliantly for him.

Larry Fuchsberg writes about music.