Arty Setting Is a Tough Match for Rossetti Quartet’s Program

Tracing, or creating, links between the visual arts and music can be an intriguing proposition. It can also be dangerous, as with Sunday’s program by the fine Rossetti String Quartet at the Getty Center, part of the Gordon Getty Concert Series. The underlying premise involved presenting music somehow related to the Getty’s current show of photographs by the fascinating German photographer August Sander. His frank yet artful portraits of the citizenry of the Weimar Republic have a cool, analytical charm, and occupy a unique spot in the history of fine art photography.

It made sense to call on the Rossetti Quartet, which takes its name from the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and credits his art as its inspiration. Something didn’t compute Sunday afternoon, though. As we listened to Beethoven’s Quartet in F, Opus 18, No. 1, lovingly performed, formally lustrous, and especially the sweet-natured romantic ear confection of Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1920 Quartet in C, the furthest thing from our minds was August Sander’s paradoxical gaze.

Sander’s aesthetic, with its precarious blend of humane affection and clinical objectivity, seemed to be in some other, distant expressive corner. Maybe something from the Second Viennese School would have made more sense. The music-art link became clearer with the concert’s one work in the second half, Paul Hindemith’s quirkily delightful “Minimax: Repertorium fur Militarmusik,” teeming with satirical touches and dizzy humor.

The level on which the concert worked best was purely musical. The Rossetti players--violinists Nina Bodnar and Henry Gronnier, violist Thomas Diener and cellist Eric Gaenslen--have a rich, sensitive ensemble voice that belies their relative youth as a group. A promising future seems to await them.