The bassoon, oboe and piano gave a jazzy voice to the Previn Trio. The Brahms quintet found its stride as it swayed and swelled with passion and good humor, especially in the final movement. Sandwiched between these two beauties was the evening's most stunning music: Osvaldo Golijov's mysterious and questing "Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind," for klezmer clarinet and string quartet.

The occasion was the inaugural concert in a chamber-music series with members of the Minnesota Orchestra at the new MacPhail Center for Music in downtown Minneapolis on Sunday night.

The room itself, Antonello Hall, deserves special notice -- what a great new chamber-music venue. Concertgoers sit in stepped rows, which, at the front, descend a bit below the performance level. Musicians are framed by a giant window that reflects the lights and players and also offers an urban view of the big apartment building across the way, complete with flickering televisions and passing strangers.

The 25-seat hall, paneled in Douglas fir, offered tight, clear acoustics. In the Previn trio, one could hear the clack of keys on John Snow's oboe and Norbert Nielubowski's bassoon. Previn's 1993 composition jumped with life in the first and third movements. The slow middle section had a gorgeous interplay of descending scales by the reeds, laced with a tinkly piano line from the far right of Timothy Lovelace's keyboard.

Golijov sought nothing less than "an epic history of Judaism" in his 1994 composition, which is made up of three movements with a prelude and postlude. The Jewish dance rhythms of the klezmer band were there, all right; and Jorja Fleezanis (concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra) was a joy to behold. She stomped her foot and grimaced as if possessed in the thrilling, vertiginous and superfast first two sections. Her exertions were extreme enough that a hair or two of her bow came loose and flew in midair during much of the passage marked "Agitati."

David Pharris played four different clarinets. He made the giant bass instrument cry out at the very top of its register, in transcendent counterpoint to Katja Linfield's plucked cello. In the "Calmo," the string players bowed weightlessly, sending off the aural equivalent of city lights seen from an airplane at night.

What fun to watch (and hear) music director Osmo Vänskä sitting in with two orchestra rookies (violist Ben Ullery and cellist Eugenia Chang) in the big Brahms piece. If it at first seemed a bit wan in the post-Golijov glow, the B minor quintet accumulated power and ended the evening on a sublime note, thanks also to winning violin work from Stephanie Arado and Céline Leathead.

Claude Peck • 612-673-7977