As Chamber Music Hawaii preps for its 25th Anniversary Gala on Friday, last week's concert by the Honolulu Brass Quintet of Chamber Music Hawaii presented a neatly symmetrical potpourri of pieces, each half beginning with Bach or Handel and ending solidly in the 20th century.

In fact, excepting the Bach and Handel works, the entire concert was 20th-century music, which might make some audiences quail.

"Twentieth-century classical music" can be such an intimidating phrase: it conjures the great history-makers, the composers dedicated to creating new and improved genres, inventing new theoretical systems, writing not for their audiences, but for posterity.

Oddly enough, many of the 20th century's innovations hailed in textbooks — serialism, atonality, aleatory — have not in general panned out, but have instead slipped quietly into serving as important influences. As hard as composers and theorists tried to convince the world that such innovations were the future, living music took quite another path.

Throughout the century, non-classical music flourished: jazz, folk, rock, musical theater, film, non-Western classical, and on, and on. The century boasted more distinct genres than had ever before existed.

What audiences, and historians, tend to forget is that classical music flourished, as well: scores of composers whose names few recognize created, and continue to create, volumes of wonderful music.

It was this music that the Honolulu Brass Quintet featured: works by Stravinsky and Shostakovich, yes, but also by Wheeler, Forsyth, Bozza, Filiatreault, and Calvert, names not yet inscribed in annals but known and loved by audiences and musicians alike.

Few programs this season have been so engaging.

There was Wheeler's wistfully moody, jazz-influenced "Song for Someone," Stravinsky's rather cubist, dynamically dramatic "Tango," Filiatreault's warm, enveloping harmonies in "Myosotis," Forsyth's clever "Golyardes' Grounde" based on a recurring four-note bass line, and Shostakovich's mocking caricature of a polka.

Closing each half of the concert were two four-movement works, Bozza's "Sonatine," which alternated scurrying light humor with darkly ponderous chords, and Calvert's appealing "Suite from the Monteregian Hills," which ranged from a melancholy Rosemary Clooney-type ballad, through a waltz that kept slipping out of triple meter, to a lightning-fast dash to the end.

These works had no need to be carefully sandwiched between familiar masterworks, as 20th-century works so often are — these were works to be savored and celebrated.

Delightful!

Friday's gala concert features the Tresemble group and a favorite of Hawai'i audiences, pianist Jon Kimura Parker. Works will include Beethoven, Brahms, and a world premiere by Eric Ewazen.