concert review: TACO

So I did, Sunday afternoon, attend an Independence Day celebration of a sort. The Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra, that group of nonprofessional musicians who get together to practice purely for the fun of it, was holding one of its rare public concerts, in the grass-lined amphitheater bowl in the park at the Mountain View civic center.

B. plays violin in this orchestra, so I chauffeured her to the event - a lot easier than driving in by herself - and stayed to listen to the concert. The conductor, knowing I was coming, even labeled one of the ADA chairs with my name. I was grateful for the chair: sitting on the ground at the top of the bowl, as the rest of the audience did, would not be in my repertoire these days.

For a patriotic program, they played not the usual custom of American classical standards like Gershwin and Copland, but resurrected one of standard patriotic songs, most of them in very fine arrangement. We had the national anthem, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, America ("My country 'tis of thee"), and America the Beautiful. We had a couple of Sousa marches (Stars & Stripes Forever and the Liberty Bell, of course). We had a few popular songs of patriotic cut: George M. Cohan's Grand Old Flag, Irving Berlin's God Bless America (on seeing that title, I always wonder if America sneezed), and Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land.

Most of these were instrumental, though the national anthem and one other were sung by a 13-year-old female student with an impressively powerful voice but some rather irregular, TACO-like, ways of expressing it, plus a pop-singer-like way of circling around the final note in a phrase before landing on it. The orchestra needed a second try on one or two of the numbers, but handled most of it pretty well.

One catch with a volunteer orchestra is that you can't control what instruments you get. For this concert, there were no oboes. Fortunately, a clarinet in C can cover the oboe part and serve as - brace for it - a fauxbo.