Richard Egarr succeeded Christopher Hogwood as music director of Britain’s Academy of Ancient Music in 2006. Despite his responsibilities there and a busy schedule as a guest conductor, he still makes time for a solo harpsichord career. Judging by his beautiful concert at the Library of Congress on Friday night, we’d be poorer if he didn’t.

Egarr has an engaging stage presence, undeflectable focus and an infectious enthusiasm for the music he plays. His thoughtfully conceived program was devoted to English keyboard masters of the late 16th and 17th centuries, with the Dutchman Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck thrown in for good measure. Egarr played a replica by Thomas and Barbara Wolf of a 1707 antique harpsichord by Nicolas Dumont.

The Sweelinck pieces, a toccata and the “Fantasia chromatica,” were luminous, their wandering into distant keys tastefully pointed up, but unmistakable. An ornate set of variations, “Goe From My Window,” by the Byrd protégé Thomas Morely, set the stage for three works by the master himself. A fantasia and a pavan and galliard by William Byrd were riveting. But it was “The Bells,” Byrd’s evocation of the peals of English church bells, that was most memorable.

The second half was devoted to two suites by John Blow and three by his pupil Henry Purcell, each followed by a chaconne or a ground. The contrast between the freewheeling Elizabethans and the more circumspect Restoration composers could not have been more vivid. Standouts here were Purcell’s Second Suite, the most substantive of them all, and his “Ground in D minor: Crown the Altar,” which ended the concert on a serious, haunting note.

Playing to an enthusiastic capacity audience, Egarr’s concert was proof, were any needed, that music even four centuries distant from us has the capacity to delight the ear and touch the heart.