Musical Masterworks will stage one of its most innovative programs this weekend - putting a new spin on things by performing its earliest music yet.

The chamber music series' Artistic Director Edward Arron has been looking for ways to get the music of Bach, music that often does not mix well with contemporary concert practices, into his programming in Old Lyme. His latest scheme is transcription: a 1985 arrangement by Dmitri Sitkovetsky for string trio of the keyboard epic the Goldberg Variations.

Cellist Arron will be joined by Colin Jacobsen and Nicholas Cords, half of the hipster string quartet Brooklyn Rider, who performed this trio with Arron last year for the final concert of the 10-year run of the Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert in New York.

The polyphony of Bach's masterpiece is set in high relief in the transcription, Arron says, with each voice given a distinctive character in the three instruments.

Arron will reach back even deeper in time with one of Heinrich Biber's 1676 Mystery Sonatas, the Passacaglia in G Minor for Solo Violin, to be performed by Jacobsen. "He plays the music of Biber's era unlike anyone I know," Arron says.

The concerts Saturday and Sunday at the First Congregational should be a pleasure for the connoisseur and the curious alike.

- MILTON MOORE

Musical Masterworks, 5 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday, First Congregational Church, 2 Ferry Road, Old Lyme; $35, $5 for students; (860) 434-2252, musicalmasterworks.org.