When a concert begins with Bach and ends with Schoenberg, the two looming like monumental bookends, it is probably sacrilegious to suggest that the high point lay in the middle, composed by a local, living composer.

Nevertheless, at Chamber Music Hawaii's Spring Wind Quintet concert, it was Neil McKay's "Five by Five" (meaning five movements played by a quintet) that charmed the audience to laughter.

"I wrote these pieces when my children were very young," McKay explained, describing them: "The Waltz is, well, a waltz ... with a couple of 2/4 measures thrown in, so that if you danced to it, you'd have to hop around on one foot. The March is faster (than usual, composed) for little feet ... And the Lullaby is what happens when the lullaby-ee goes to sleep."

The pieces were short, sweet, and such fun! Clearly, music does not have to be grandiose to be wonderful.

Spring Wind Quintet has recorded McKay's "Five by Five" and will soon release a CD that includes a work by the late Allen Trubitt. McKay, now an emeritus professor, and Trubitt were long-time colleagues of composition in the music department at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.

The monumental bookends were both well-known works presented in transcription: Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, transcribed from organ for wind quintet, and Schoenberg's "Verklarte Nacht," an early tonal work for string sextet, often performed by string orchestra, and transcribed for wind septet.

Bassoonist Marsha Schweitzer of the Spring Wind Quintet transcribed and arranged both. For the septet, Pavel Morunov on English horn and Norman Foster on bass clarinet joined the Spring Wind Quintet.

"Schoenberg's 'Verklarte Nacht' is one of my favorite pieces," Schweitzer said, "and one of the great pieces of the Romantic repertoire. Every time I heard it, I thought, 'Something's missing' — it was the sound of the winds."

In both pieces, some passages were unavoidably unidiomatic for winds, but Schweitzer's transcription/arrangements used the instruments well, capturing the essence of the originals while using the winds' colorful timbres to reveal inner lines with more clarity. In fact, Schweitzer's arrangement of the Schoenberg has been well received and is in use outside of Hawai'i.

The Spring Wind Quintet rounded out its program with the only work originally composed as a wind quintet, a work by the talented Czech composer Pavel Haas, who died in a World War II concentration camp at age 45.