Is there anything more delightful than hearing one of the San Francisco Symphony’s finest musicians step into the spotlight for a solo? Well, what about getting two of them?

The orchestra’s program in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, April 13, was one of its regular forays into the music of the Baroque, when the number of players onstage is whittled down to a translucent chamber group, and individual contributions stand out more than ever.Jane Glover, the renowned British conductor and early-music specialist, was on hand to lead music of Bach and Handel, along with a beguiling contemporary ringer.

But the heroes of the evening were violinist Alexander Barantschik, the orchestra’s longtime concertmaster, and principal oboist Eugene Izotov, who lent Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe a sizzle and shimmer that lingered in a listener’s memory long after the concert had come to an end.

The excellence of both these musicians is, of course, very old news by now.Barantschik’s arrivalhere in 2001 brought an immediate improvement to the quality of the orchestra’s string playing, and Izotov has been a standout since the first of histwo stintswith the Symphony as ayoung phenom.

但观众听到他们几乎exclusively as part of the larger ensemble, or else in individual solo turns. The partnership between the two — trading melodic phrases, breathing together rhythmically as one, melding the different sounds of their respective instruments into a single radiant strand — was a revelatory kind of thrill.

The rewards were clearest in the concerto’s opening movement, where Bach engineers a sort of game of three-handed catch among the two soloists and the orchestra. The main melody is cast as a call-and-response, and most performers articulate the phrasing breaks sharply to create the illusion of pointed dialogue.

Izotov and Barantschik adopted a different line, stitching the melody together into an unbroken skein. The result was to give the music a degree of suavity and ease that more angular readings generally miss, and the fluency with which both players dispatched their parts only added to the effect.

Glover, meanwhile, led the orchestra with a welcome combination of vigor and tenderness — the same qualities she brought to the entire program. Bach’s “Magnificat,” which opened the program, sounded rough around the edges, thanks to some spotty contributions from the Symphony Chorus, which is still operating without a permanent director since thedeparture of Ragnar Bohlintwo years ago.

But the trumpets, led by principal Mark Inouye and associate principal Aaron Schuman, brought blazing intensity to the work, and did so again after intermission in a superb account of Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks.”

Handel’s pageantry was introduced by “Spectacle of Light,” a winsome curtain-raiser by Chicago composerStacy Garropthat was written in 2020 as a companion piece for the “Fireworks Music.”

Inspired both by Handel’s work and by a lithograph of the 1749 pyrotechnics display on the River Thames for which it was composed, Garrop’s score evokes colorful explosions of light across the water. She uses Handel’s instrumentation and harmonic language, but within that framework she creates a vivid nocturnal picture all her own.

Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@JoshuaKosman