The program said “Blow, Fly, Pop!!’s orchestration is unlike any other. “ That, my friends, is truth in advertising. It looked like a kids’ party (sans scary clown) gone terribly wrong, with the string section starting the piece by waving plastic pencil boards through the air.

And yet, though the sound of the gym ball being thumped didn’t have quite the gravitas of that of a bass drum, and the third balloon the percussionist popped was out of tune (perhaps suffering from an inflation problem, like the economy), the selection wasn’t terrible.

So I got over any disappointment that the piece was not, as I had wrongly anticipated from a too quick reading of the website, “Pop the Cherry” by Blowfly.

The evening moved from a selection reminiscent of minors to two classical pieces in minor keys, Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 (New World Symphony), which is familiar to movie fans, perhaps for its use in films like Clear and Present Danger and The Departed, but more likely for its place in Killer Tomatoes Eat France!, the fourth sequel to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.