On Sunday afternoon, Nov. 14, at Massachusetts Bay Community College, the Wellesley Symphony Orchestra, featuring an unusually talented family -- the Charness family -- treated a large audience to a special concert. All members of the Charness family are musical and play together as a quintet and separately as soloists. The audience was indeed charmed.

The concert was part of the World of Wellesley Festival and opened with the first movement of Bach's Second Brandenburg Concerto. These concerti involve a small group of soloists and orchestra, and in this case, the small group was the Charness Family Quintet. Mother, Deborah, plays flute; Father, Michael plays keyboard; 14-year-old Sarah and 9-year-old Jennifer play the violin; while 12-year-old Daniel plays the cello. The balance between soloists and the Wellesley Symphony, conducted by Max Hobart, was just about perfect.

Daniel Charness then played solo cello in Haydn's Cello Concerto in C. His tone was sweet, yet strong, and he elicited an enthusiastic response from the audience. Eduard Lalo's ever-popular Symphonie Espagnol was next on the program. Sarah Charness, looking beautiful and poised in a floor-length muted blue gown, played with a sonorous tone that lent itself equally well to Lalo's angular Spanish rhythms and his ravishing, linear melodic lines.

'Family Parable' premiere
All five Charness family members returned to the stage for the world premiere of composer Howard Frazin's piece, "Family Parable." A longtime colleague of Deborah and Michael, as well as a teacher of Sarah, Daniel and Jennifer, Frazin composed this piece specifically for the Charness family. Each instrumentalist had a solo passage that fit the personality of the player. This very interesting and well-received piece depicted the interaction between the various family members. Frazin is co-director of Composers in Red Sneakers and teaches composition and theory at the Longy School of Music.