Chamber Music Hawaii's Monday concert at the Doris Duke Theatre, which repeats at Paliku Theatre next week (see box), celebrated music's quirky aesthetic of balanced asymmetry with "five by five," a lighthearted quintet of serious works — two old, three new — by the Honolulu Brass Quintet. While the program included familiar works, it was the unfamiliar that stole the show.

Mark Schubert and Ken Hafner (trumpet), Wade Butin (horn), Bill Zehfuss (trombone), and Dave Saltzman (tuba) opened with delightful selections from "Suite of Elizabethan Dances" by the then-popular, now-largely-forgotten English composer of the late Renaissance, Anthony Holborne.

The six dances, "HonieSuckle," "Wanton," "Fruit of Love," "Fairie-round," and so on, proved as whimsical as their titles: joyfully warm and well-balanced honeysuckle tone; dancelike rhythms enticing wantonly; sensual fruits of love from the deep-pile velvet timbre of tuba-trombone-horn. Witty, vivid, full of late-Renaissance double entendres — it is no wonder these pieces were so popular. The Honolulu Brass Quintet's enjoyment in playing them was audible.

The quintet closed the first half of the concert with the once-outdated, now-almost-revered J.S. Bach and a transcription of his "St. Anne" Prelude and Fugue.

The evening's least likely favorite, a 20th-century piece carefully sandwiched between the two older works, its title suggesting a token 12-tone vitamin-pill-of-a-piece, turned out to be the most interesting.

When Butin introduced Jack Gale's "12 Bar, 12 Beat, 12 Tone Blues" and "Serial Stomp" as "fun-loving serialism," you could feel the skepticism rising. But Butin was right: These were pieces to lure even those who hate serialism.

Jazz and serialism may seem to have little in common, but Gale turned them into comfortable bedfellows, and the Honolulu Brass Quintet made them swing. Serial chromaticisms slid into the melody as jazz riffs and bent notes, and jazz patterns infused the serial structures with levity. Each style/technique stretched the boundaries of the other to create a charming hybrid.

The second half of the program featured contrasting works, Victor Ewald's light, sweet Quintet No. 2, the only work on the program originally composed for brass quintet, and a suite of eight numbers from Bernstein's "West Side Story" in an excellent arrangement by Gale.

Honolulu Brass Quintet presented its own contrasts. With this concert, the ensemble introduced a new member, Zehfuss (trombone), and bid farewell Saltzman (tuba), who has been with the Honolulu Symphony and CMH since 1997 and is leaving to accept a position with the Toledo Symphony.

Saltzman has been a firm anchor and elegant soloist; he will be sorely missed.