Chamber music writ large: That's what you'll find at this weekend's St. Paul Chamber Orchestra concerts. The SPCO periodically presents chamber music, with a handful of orchestra members splitting off into small groups. These concerts take two works written for string quartet and give them the full-orchestra treatment.

Add a couple more new works — including the premiere of an SPCO commission — and you have the rare major orchestra concert consisting entirely of pieces from the 2020s. The one-hour "express concert" the SPCO offered on Friday morning at Eden Prairie's Wooddale Church proved a satisfying exploration of new ideas and older ones that have undergone intriguing transformations.

English composer Anna Clyne has proved a fresh and fascinating voice on the classical scene this century, and this weekend's concerts open with her 2020 piece for 10 winds, "Overflow." It's an atmospheric work that evokes a seaside reverie spent staring at waves, eddies and whirlpools that form and dissipate. While played impeccably, it did inspire a longing for one of the winds to break free from the rhythmic chatter and sing out a melody, something French horn players Matthew Wilson and Patrick Pridemore eventually did to fine effect.

The centerpiece of these concerts has a title that deserves some explanation. First, Beethoven wrote a violin sonata called the "Kreutzer," named for a benefactor. Then Leo Tolstoy wrote a novella called "The Kreutzer Sonata" about a man driven into a jealous rage when his wife helps perform that piece. Then Czech composer Leoš Janáček named his First String Quartet after Tolstoy's novella.

And now SPCO cellist Richard Belcher has orchestrated that string quartet, his arrangement proving to be an imaginative reworking of Janáček. Full of finely honed textures periodically interrupted by agitated outbursts from solo string players, it haunts with its glassy slithers and sighs before resolving in a place of sad resignation, articulated in the solo violin of Robin Scott.

Billy Childs is best known as a jazz musician, but he also creates works for orchestra, and the SPCO co-commissioned a piece from him that receives its local premiere at these concerts. "Each Moment is a New Discovery" is most engaging when Childs moves toward a darker, more troubled tone, casting aside an early breeziness in favor of urgent unease.

The Childs piece was originally premiered last year by New York's Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the same group that brought the world Michi Wiancko's deeply involving arrangement of a movement from Maurice Ravel's lone String Quartet. In the SPCO's hands, "Tres rythme" proved a fine enhancement of all that's great about Ravel's quartet, one of the 20th century's masterpieces of chamber music.

I particularly loved Wiancko's decision to place us in a parallel universe by giving some of the movement's most memorable melodies to Wilson's French horn and Lynn Erickson's trumpet. And the piece's fast, vigorous pizzicatos — which can sound like anxious whispers in the original — felt assertive and powerful when in the hands of the orchestra's full complement of strings. It proved an exhilarating conclusion to a refreshing collection of works.

Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.

St. Paul Chamber Orchestra

What: Works by Anna Clyne, Leoš Janáček, Billy Childs and Maurice Ravel

When and where: 7 p.m. Fri., Wooddale Church, 6630 Shady Oak Road, Eden Prairie; 7 p.m. Sat., St. Paul's United Church of Christ, 900 Summit Ave., St. Paul; 3 p.m. Sun., St. Andrew's Lutheran Church, 900 Stillwater Road, Mahtomedi

Tickets: $16-$36 (students and children admitted free), available at 651-291-1144 or thespco.org