When was the last time you laughed out loud at a classical music concert?

Humor in music is rare, which makes it all the more delightful when it does appear. On Friday, Dohnanyi's "Variations on a Nursery Song" had the Ho-nolulu Symphony audience smiling and laughing as it poked fun at serious music.

Actually a piano concerto, "Variations" began with a grandiloquent orchestral introduction leading up to the piano's opening theme: "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."

From there, Dohnanyi created an impressively virtuosic discourse, replete with hilarious, tongue-in-cheek digressions commenting on 19th- and early-20th-century music.

"Variations" featured Fabio Bidini, an Italian pianist teaching in Berlin, who performed Friday without even a hint of his 12-hour jet lag. Before the concert, Bidini explained that however simple and childlike the theme, the piano part presents formidable challenges: "Technically, it's not a pianistic piece ... the positions are very awkward ... because we were born with five fingers not all the same length and there are no black notes (for the longer middle fingers to play)."

Bidini's playing swept over those difficulties without a hitch and focused on the music's charming mimicry, from lush melodies and quirky waltzes, to off-kilter marches and wild fantasies. In response to enthusiastic applause, he closed the first half quietly, with a Chopin encore.

Guest conductor Heiichiro Ohyama, modest of demeanor on the podium as well as off, seemed to revel in the varied characterizations of the Dohnanyi and of Elgar's "Enigma Variations," which filled the second half of the concert.

In contrast to the pleasant but gray-toned Mozart Symphony that opened the evening, every personality that Elgar sketched lovingly and with gentle sympathy came vividly to life under Ohyama's baton.

The program very helpfully identified and described the people Elgar had captured in music, and it would have been nice to have the houselights partway up to allow those less familiar with the piece to read the descriptions as they listened.

Even so, the music was captivating, and the audience, which had to struggle through rain and snarled traffic Friday evening to get to Blaisdell, responded enthusiastically.