When Alban Berg composed his masterful opera Lulu, he needed a method of moving the action along quickly. He came up with the idea of a film strip (for younger readers, this was roughly the equivalent of a Powerpoint slide show). Both Berg’s penchant for mixed media and the texts of his acquaintance Elias Canetti, a rather nostalgic observer of the Viennese music scene, who portrayed him in his book “The Play of the Eyes,” were cited at the Rose Theater Thursday evening as the Lincoln Center Festival presented “Eraritjaritjaka,” a rather unclassifiable piece by Heiner Goebbels.

The work seems to be the product of a trend in modern concert life wherein chamber groups feel the obligation to perform more than “just” music: A quartet might play for a while and then a reciter may intone some poetry or prose passages. However, in Eraritjaritjaka, the Mondriaan String Quartet (Jan Erik van Regteren Altena and Edwin Blankenstijn, violins; Annette Bergman, viola; and Eduard van Regteren Altena, cello) played during the spoken passages. The musicians fulfilled three distinct functions in this event, alternating between stand-alone band, background providers, and dramatis personae.

The musicians presented the overture, the beginning of the first movement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8, in a rather cold and stiff manner. The foursome never let loose with the visceral excitement that is paramount in this movement, and, at the time, I judged this rendition as substandard. However, as the theater piece developed, I realized the contextual sense of this rather dispassionate approach.

The actor André Wilms spoke Mr. Canetti’s lines in French, capturing his aphoristic style and occasionally platitudinous content in a rather understated manner. Sets were extremely minimal and costumes unassuming as a medley of highly dissonant 20th-century music, from the king of the Soviet futurists, Alexeij Mossolov to the postmodern Vassily Lobanov, punctuated the first half of the program. The quartet’s uniform stylistic approach made it clear that they had been charged by arranger-director Goebbels to concentrate on limpidity and cleanliness of attack rather than on emotional content.

The Rose is just a few blocks from the Ed Sullivan Theater and Mr. Goebbels borrowed a device from its most famous current tenant by directing Mr. Wilms to leave the auditorium midway through the performance. In perfect David Letterman style, he not only left us to sit in the dark, but, pursued by a handheld camera, he walked down the hall, into the elevator, and right out the front door into the streets of Columbus Circle. In the scene most reminiscent of a forward-thinking production of Lulu, Mr. Wilms — now morphed into a character in a video — jumped into a cab and went home!

The remainder of the evening consisted of the quartet back as the centerpiece of the live action and their coordination with Mr. Wilms and his quotidian activities at his apartment. To Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, we observed Mr. Wilms making an omelet, chopping onions to the rhythm of Ravel’s Assez vif and whisking his eggs to the swirling Allegro moderato. This was all a bit too clever by half, but did exude a certain gentleness that I found both refreshing and charming. From a musical perspective, it was disturbing that, although all four movements of the Ravel began, none actually finished. Further, the constraints of the imposed stylistic conformity rendered this normally shimmering, colorful masterwork a bit monochromatic.

As Mr. Wilms grew more like Canetti at home — he took pains to read us a current headline about the power outage in Queens, but wrote at a typewriter and spoke with a neighbor about how they lived on a particular street in Vienna — the choice of music grew even more inspired with one of the greatest pieces of the last century, George Crumb’s Black Angels. Here, the electronic amplification that had permeated the proceedings thus far was actually true to the composer’s intentions, and the Mondriaan performance was superb. These five minutes alone justified the price of admission for the entire evening.

“Eraritjaritjaka,” is an aboriginal word that means “driven by the desire for something that is lost.” In this case, the remarkable humility and comforting humanity of this enjoyable effort at least partially ameliorated that loss.