Old Lyme - There's really no other performing arts group around these parts quite like Musical Masterworks. The chamber music series appears to be perched at the end of a talent tunnel wormhole straight to Manhattan, so musicians can step directly from the nation's top music venues into the small church in Old Lyme.

Saturday's concert, to be repeated at 3 p.m. today, was a vivid illustration.

Masterworks artistic director and cellist Edward Arron last spring concluded a 10-year run as the artistic director of the Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert in New York. The audience at the First Congregational Church this weekend inherited both the program and the performers from that final Met concert and were treated to a rarity: a performance that was both eclectic and comfortably satisfying.

The program had just two works: one of Heinrich Biber's 1676 Mystery Sonatas, the Passacaglia in G Minor for Solo Violin, a trancelike piece that was the earliest music performed in Masterworks' 23 years, and a 1985 string trio arrangement by Dmitry Sitkovetsky of Bach's epic Goldberg Variations, one of the longest and certainly the most celebrated of all variations for keyboard.

Joining Arron in the Bach were violinist Colin Jacobsen and violist Nicholas Cords, half of the innovative string quartet Brooklyn Rider, which performed here in 2012. When Arron calls them "old friends," he isn't exaggerating. "Colin and I have been playing chamber music together regularly since we were 10 years old," he said Saturday.

The concert opened with Jacobsen standing alone to perform the Biber Passacaglia, one of the frankly meditative sonatas intended to evoke specific mysteries of the Scripture, with the passacaglia's repeated foundation representing a guardian angel, constant and unwavering.

Playing with virtually no vibrato, Jacobsen wove a hypnotic whole from the many variations, at times austere, at times ethereal, built on a simple, descending four-note framework. Virtuosic in the technical passages, he was best doing the least, suspending the musical line in deliciously tantalizing anticipation of the next variation.

Biber's long and probing work seems a direct forebear to Bach's Chaconne in D Minor of the next century, and as Arron pointed out, both works are built on partial scales, the Bach in G Major and the Biber in G Minor. To hear music as familiar as the Goldbergs ("it's in everyone's desert island discs," Arron quipped) transformed from keyboard to string trio was a delight of discovery.

For starters, the contrapuntal lines were in much higher relief in three distinct voices. This was apparent from the very start, when inner lines for the keyboard were expressed as almost free-standing musical ideas by violist Cords, who shared Jacobsen's minimalist approach to vibrato.

The performance both illuminated the complexity of Bach's score, even for those who grew up with Glenn Gould's revelatory recording, and took very familiar passages and tilted their characters. The 70-minute work opens and closes with a long theme bookending 30 variations, and it's no coincidence that Bach labelled the opening tune as "aria," a major clue to interpretation.

In the string setting, the theme and variations were more vocal, more songlike than on keyboard, and the counterpoint starker, as Arron, Cords and Jacobsen gave the woven harmonies distinct individual voices.

Songlike legato gave way to robust dances, and the more aggressive variants, such as the stretto attack of the 10th, were bigger and bolder in the string setting. The three variations that darkened to G Minor were especially powerful, almost operatic, particularly the 21st and 25th. The hour flashed by.

It was a most unusual chamber music concert, one without the structures such as sonata form and rondos that are the building blocks of the works in the core repertoire. As such, it was intriguing, entertaining, provocative and very welcomed.