Chamber Music Hawaii opened its 25th anniversary season this week with the archetypal concert: a string quartet performing Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Has it really been 25 years since CMH began? For that matter, has it really been 200 years (give or take a quarter-century) since these works were composed?

Anniversaries have an odd way of straightening out memories while bending time, making the past seem near and far at the same time.

Chamber Music Hawaii was granted a charter of incorporation 25 years ago, but its beginning goes back even further. According to its newsletter, five Honolulu Symphony musicians led by Bill Lightfoot banded together in 1974 and began playing concerts as the Spring Wind Quintet.

Encouraged by the quintet's success, other Honolulu Symphony musicians founded the Honolulu Brass Quintet and the Galliard String Quartet. Eventually, the three ensembles joined forces, creating an administrative umbrella organization, CMH, in 1982, and collaborating to form a fourth group, called Tresemble.

Four of the founding members still perform with their groups: Marsha Schweitzer is bassoonist in the Spring Wind Quintet; Mark Schubert is trumpeter in the Honolulu Brass; violinist Claire Sakai Hazzard and cellist Karen Bechtel of the Galliard String Quartet performed in the Anniversary Season opener.

Last week at the Doris Duke Theatre, in the first of two performances, the program seemed a fitting opening tribute: CMH founders presenting chamber music's "founding fathers."

Haydn's Op. 20 set of quartets — No. 4 was on the program — basically created the modern quartet, establishing the basic structure, the four equal voices, and the higher aesthetic standards. The Galliard Quartet navigated Haydn's sweet passions and surprising turns smoothly. Bechtel's variation in the second movement shone, and violist Mark Butin's nuances charmed throughout.

Mozart, being Mozart, experimented: in the Adagio and Fugue performed Monday, he reinvented Bach with new ideas, sounding like a masked player, not quite Bach, not quite Mozart, but something of both.

And Beethoven's late quartets, starting with the Op. 127 that closed the concert, provided both Classical pinnacle and Romantic foundation. Few performers today appreciate how thoroughly weird Beethoven's late quartets were, with awkward passages alternating with aching beauty, their sudden changes in mood and turns around musical corners to find unexpected vistas.

Aside from occasional struggles with intonation, the Galliard Quartet played passionately, Sakai Hazzard dazzling with light, fast passages, and Hung Wu's singing tone emerging to the foreground in the third movement.

After more than 200 years, these composers remain at the core of classical canon, reminding us of the potential inherent in all beginnings.

Watch for future CMH anniversary concerts this season; they range widely through the canon: Poulenc, Ewald, Strauss, Arnold, Sweelinck, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms ... and Bozza, among others.