His approach to Bach’s music emphasized the emotional core within its rational precision and dancing rhythms, even while retaining the transparency of historically informed performance. Mr. Kenney seems to view — and, more impressively, convey — the sonatas and partitas not at the level of measures or phrases, but entire movements. Yet at no point does his interpretation draw attention to itself.

So the Adagio from Bach’s Sonata No. 1 that opened Friday’s program had both remarkable clarity and feeling, with the lightness of a dance among clouds. If its humanity was barely hiding below the surface, then Mr. Kenney ripped it out in Gyorgy Kurtag’s brief “Ruhelos” from “Kafka Fragments” (1987), which shares the Bach’s double stops but adds the performer’s shouting voice.

Primed by Mr. Kenney’s program note, I couldn’t avoid spotting more similarities — on a technical level, yes, but also on an emotional one — between the Baroque and contemporary works. George Enescu’s 20th-century “Ménétrier,” in which expressive lyricism is broken up by fleet passages, offers a brief glimpse at Bach’s monumental Chaconne with its arpeggios; so did a fantasia by Nicola Matteis from the dawn of the 18th century and Kaija Saariaho’s “Nocturne” nearly 300 years later. Steve Reich’s 1967 “Violin Phase” came off here as a potential étude for the demanding exactitude of Bach.

Mr. Kenney closed the program by pairing Thuridur Jonsdottir’s “Inni” (2013) and the Chaconne from Bach’s Second Partita. “Inni” had some people in the audience giggling — it features a field recording of a baby, like Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?” but somehow more endearing — yet it was one of the evening’s most beautiful works, the audio accompanied by Mr. Kenney’s intimate phrases of soft-spoken awe.

The Chaconne, however, was vastly more urgent. Mr. Kenney’s peaks and valleys of passion, and his more modern approach to the score, stood out even among his other interpretations of Bach. He made it seem, though, as if this were the only possible way to play the music: Because if “Inni” took a moment to marvel at life, then this Chaconne aimed to do no less than summarize its entirety.

Alexi Kenney

Performed Friday at the 92nd Street Y, Manhattan.