Who goes to a bar to hear Brahms?

As it happened, 130 or so people did just that Tuesday night, venturing to the Amsterdam Bar & Hall in downtown St. Paul to sit on folding chairs, sip wine, nibble on a dessert and observe the members of Accordo, the local chamber ensemble, play string quintets by Brahms and Mozart, and then answer questions and interact with the audience.

The program was part of an ongoing effort by the Schubert Club to explore unusual venues for its presentations, with the hope of attracting new, perhaps younger audiences or at least providing regular concertgoers with a different kind of informal concert experience. A similar notion has turned a bar in lower Manhattan, Le Poisson Rouge, into a busy alternative concert space.

Whether Tuesday's program created any classical-music lovers is hard to say. Though young people were present, the crowd tilted in the direction of gray (or no) hair. Even so, by most measures, the evening was a success. Ken Freed, violist with the Minnesota Orchestra, acted as genial host, introducing the music and the musicians, fielding questions and keeping things rolling along.

Jokes proliferated. Freed pointed out that Franz Joseph Haydn probably played viola alongside Mozart in the first performance in Vienna of the latter's Quintet No. 5 in D Major. But who played first viola, Haydn or Mozart? Cellist Ronald Thomas had the answer: Haydn always played the second viola part because he sat behind Mozart, which meant he was — here it comes — hidin'.

The two violinists — Erin Keefe, concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra, and Ruggero Allifranchini, associate concertmaster of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra — alternated in the first-violin chair. "It's fun to do both parts," Keefe said. "It uses both parts of your brain." In an earlier day, the first violin was always the boss of a string quartet, Thomas said. "It's a more democratic system in chamber music now."

The musicians played just two movements from each of the works, the other being Brahms' String Quintet No. 1 in F Major. (The expert violists were Rebecca Albers and Shuangshuang Liu.) They played the full program Monday night at Christ Church Lutheran in south Minneapolis as the finale of Accordo's sixth season. Surprisingly, the group sounded better in the Amsterdam. The church's dry acoustics (and brick walls) robbed the music of warmth and color, a special burden in Brahms.

These were good performances, nonetheless. Not all the inner voicings in either work were absolutely clear, especially in the bustling contrapuntal sections, but tempos and balances were well gauged, rhythms were taut and incisive, and subtle gradations in dynamics were carefully observed.

Finally, on the matter of Brahms at the Amsterdam, it should be noted that Brahms himself, at the tender age of 13, began playing piano deep into the night in seedy waterfront bars in his hometown of Hamburg, doing what all musicians do when they're starting out — filling up the tip jar.

Michael Anthony is a Minneapolis writer.