What Ms. Panetti contributed was a 30-minute burst of contemporary anxiety, couched in a chromatic language that at times evoked Schoenberg's early, pre-Serial style. The piano and string writing was perfectly balanced, and conveyed a sense of the keyboard as the searching persona in Roethke's poem, with the strings as the mysterious and often chaotic forces beyond which spiritual truths could be found.

But in a way, Ms. Panetti seems skeptical of the peace that Roethke finds in the final lines, which read: ''A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. / The mind enters itself, and God the mind. / And one is One, free in the tearing wind.'' Here Ms. Panetti gives the quartet a rich, consonant chord, and then demurs, adding a gently clashing patch of piano texture to the closing bars.

--Allan Kozinn, New York Times