I'd guess that there was some sort of deliberate conception at work here. Certainly the approach paid off in places (the Trio of the Menuetto, where the small scale allowed an unusual degree of nuance in articulation and shading, comes to mind). But it muted the piece's most characteristic features — its pure generosity of melody and its ceaseless, rich lyricism. The entire quartet seemed somehow anxious not to sing too forthrightly. In the Rondeau finale, the expressive reticence was exacerbated by a tempo too fast for comfort — even the players' own, to judge by the number of times the movement relaxed fractionally and then was goosed back up to speed. As a whole the performance felt ill at ease, despite many particular felicities of tone and inflection. I kept waiting for all concerned just to relax and sing.

In Debussy's G-Minor Quartet, the Rossettis seemed on more secure ground. Theirs was a lithe, concentrated performance that contrived to be light and intense at the same time, with a lot of air in the sound but enough grit in the attack not to let it float away. The quiet playing was especially fine. The quartet would sometimes skirt the edge of audibility, but mercifully without giving the impression that it was trotting out a signature "effect"; you just found, almost without realizing it, that you were suddenly listening more intently than before. The slow movement, a shade faster than usual, put the Rossettis' airy sound to poetic use.

It was after intermission, however, that the ensemble really came into its own, in Dvorák's late A-flat-major Quartet, Op. 105. Dvorák's chamber music has a curiously motley performance history. The favorites (the "American" Quartet, the Second Piano Quintet, the "Dumky" Trio, and increasingly also the E-flat Quartet and the E-flat Piano Quartet) are near-ubiquitous, while nearly everything else is surprisingly little played. It's not difficult to understand why. The winners in the popularity game are the works in which Dvorák hasn't let his harmonic and formal imagination get too much in the way of the fetching tunes. The other major chamber works, for various reasons, are simply too complicated for real popularity.

Op. 105 is a case in point. All the necessary ingredients seem to be there — catchy pentatonic tunes; soaring lines; a touchingly simple, serene opening theme in the slow movement; and a real honey of a furiant-style Scherzo. But along with all that comes a passel of disquietingly complex ideas. The piece is harmonically fidgety, apt to spin off on wildly chromatic detours and take its time coming back. Then, too, the textures are quirky, teeming with uncomfortably restless rhythmic material. There are grand tunes, but few places where you're at leisure to sit back and luxuriate in them.

Something in that most interesting welter of material obviously struck a chord with the Rossettis, because they sounded almost like a different quartet in the Dvorák. Their articulation possessed a fine, characterful crispness that I hadn't heard earlier in the program, together with a much greater weight and urgency in the collective sound. The tone had some real meat on its bones, and now that everyone was digging in in earnest, the characters of the individual players were more sharply distinguished, too. (Fain, in particular, turned out to have a gritty, intense timbre in his quiver that I would never have suspected from the Mozart.) This was a performance of some individuality and considerable visceral excitement.

The quartet played two encores: the first of Dvorák's Op. 54 Waltzes (in the composer's string quartet transcription), followed by the slow movement of Haydn's F-minor Quartet, Op. 20/5. The Dvorák was delightfully relaxed and free, full of rhythmic zest as well, while the delicately inflected performance of the Haydn made me curious to hear the Rossetti Quartet play the complete piece. It suggested a level of care and attention I hadn't heard in the quartet's Mozart. All in all, this was a recital to make me want to hear more of an uneven but interesting ensemble. May they come back our way soon.