Cassatt String Quartet at the Hayden Planetarium Summer Solstice The Cassatt String Quartet performed at the Hayden Planetarium on Wednesday evening. As throngs of musicians and listeners, professional and amateur, looked forward to Make Music New York - an annual daylong, citywide celebration of the summer solstice on Thursday - the Hayden Planetarium, with its proprietary interest in the phenomenon, stole a march on Wednesday evening. Part of the American Museum of Natural History, the planetarium presented "Summer Solstice," a collaboration between the Cassatt String Quartet and Carter Emmart, the museum's director of astrovisualization and the wizard behind the curtain of the Digital Universe, the museum's compilation of data gathered from astronomical catalogs and other sources. The visual spectacle amounted to 2012: A Space Odyssey, as Dr. Emmart filled the planetarium's dome with a moving composite of photographs and illustrations, taking the viewer on an hourlong journey from somewhere in Earth's orbit near the International Space Station to the farthest reaches of the universe, where the skies seemed to be raining galaxies in glorious profusion, and back. The Cassatt players, meanwhile, offered night-themed, time-related or merely melancholy or mysterious works and movements by Bloch, Sebastian Currier, Ramin Arjomand, Dvorak, Borodin, Andy Teirstein and Gershwin. It was never a fair fight. As Dr. Emmart said in a question-and-answer session afterward, "In this room, the visuals are overwhelming." They were, in ways both good and bad. There was a repeated sense of wonder: at the images being displayed and what they represented; at the technology and sheer human ingenuity involved in amassing the data and turning them into representational form. But with images showing places far beyond Earth, not much was self-explanatory except for the brief spiraling of planetary orbits and the close encounters on the return trip with the pockmarked surface of Mars and the mountainous regions of the Moon. Without adequate context, the images often devolved into sensory overload: awe-inspiring confusion, but confusion nonetheless. Context will undoubtedly be provided on Tuesday, in the planetarium's "Grand Tour of the Universe." All this rendered the music truly incidental, though the Cassatt players performed gamely and artistically, amplified a bit in a room understandably built with little regard for musical acoustics. The pieces that most caught the attention were the three by Mr. Currier - "Quiet Time," "Time's Arrow" and "Time Flow" - with rhythmic and textural qualities that sometimes worked against the images in fruitful counterpoint. More often the sense was merely accompanimental. Mr. Arjomand's "Lullaby," in its premiere, fell into a temporal and aesthetic space between the Currier pieces and excerpts from Dvorak's "Cypresses," unmemorably. More or less countrified pieces by Mr. Teirstein brought things back down to Earth, in more ways than one. And Gershwin's alternately swaying and swinging "Lullaby" put the seal on an evening of charm and adventure, marvel and muddle.