The hills are alive with the sound of music. But not in Austria - in the hills of Wellesley. And it won't be the von Trapp family performing. It'll be the Charnesses. On Nov. 14 at Mass. Bay Community College in Wellesley Hills, the Charness Family Quintet will join the Wellesley Symphony Orchestra for a program of Bach, Lalo, Haydn, Frazin and Beethoven.

Mom Charness seems to be the boss.

"If you'd asked me 20 years ago if I'd be playing music with my family, I would have laughed at you. It's something that has pleasantly evolved. Now, [in addition to playing] I manage our whole ensemble," Deborah Charness says, "People ask me what I did today. I made phone calls. I wrote letters."

And that doesn't allow much practice time for this highly competent flutist, who studied for four years in Paris with renowned flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal.

Amid the normal interruptions of zipping 11-year-old cellist Daniel ("I'll be 12 by the time of the concert," he says) to hockey practice, 14-year-old violinist Sarah to ballet lessons and 8-year-old violinist Jennifer to soccer, Charness manages to work in what really counts: getting all the kids to their music lessons at New England Conservatory.

The Charness children had barely cut their first teeth before they were bowing. And they take their music lessons seriously. Well, not tooseriously; Daniel's got a sense of the future, but being a concert cellist doesn't figure in.

"I'll never play the cello professionally, but I'll play it the rest of my life. I do it for fun," he says. "I like to listen to classical music, but I sometimes get sick of it."

Not a healthy sign for someone about to play the solo in the first movement of the Haydn C major cello concerto at the Nov. 14 concert. Haydn, at the court of the wealthy Hungarian Esterhazy family in the 1760s, wrote at least two cello concertos, and being the master he was, the solo lines aren't easy.

But they're not as hard as the cello part in the last piece of the program, Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony.

"The Pastorale is ridiculously hard," Daniel confesses. "The cello part is impossible. I've heard that even [professional cellists] find it hard to play."

And that comes from someone who's been playing since the age of 4.

The piece on the program that will show the Charnesses at their best is Howard Frazin's "Family Parable," a piece specifically written for the ensemble.

"I was commissioned to write them something with an orchestra, but because they tour, they also wanted something just they could play together," Frazin says. "The orchestral part I wrote can also be played by the piano."

And that's where Papa Charness plays his part. Dr. Michael Charness is associate chief of neurology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. He specializes in musicians whose hands are hindering their performance - flutists, pianists, cellists. No one mentions any names, but Deborah divulges, "We have celebrities coming to our house at all hours of the night for treatment."

But never mind that. The important thing is that he's the pianist for the group.

Deborah considers Frazin part of the family.

"When we get together to practice," she says, "the kids talk about 'doing the Howie,' the same way they say 'doing the Beethoven.'"

The "Howie" they're doing is a single-movement piece written just for them.

"I tried to capture [the players'] personalities in the music," Frazin says. "People will think of family when they hear the piece ... I chose sort of a macabre aspect in an interesting sort of way."

"Howie's very familiar with the dynamics of the family," Deborah adds. "He's written the piece so cleverly. Rather than have us all play together, we dovetail each other, but there's a theme persistent throughout. We each play ourselves - my music sounds like me, Daniel's sounds like him. At the beginning everything is calm and easy. But then the kids arrive and rattle my cage. My little one [Jenny] soothes me and hands off the melody to Daniel, who gets a little mad, then he gives the melody to Sarah. She has a gorgeous melody, probably the most gorgeous melody of the whole piece."

Daniel supports Deborah's assessment of Frazin's accomplishments.

"[The music] totally describes the mood of the family," he says. "I consider myself a little bit different. My part's very melodic, then there are a couple places when I get loud and obnoxious."

Daniel realizes the music reveals more about himself than maybe he wants people to know.

"I can be obnoxious, coming from the whole family's perspective," he admits.

Not so obnoxious that he plays second fiddle, however. He still gets the cello solos and would probably agree that the family that plays together, stays together.