Art imitated art at The Andy Warhol Museum on Monday evening.

An overflow crowd in the museum theater heard Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra co-principal bassoonist David Sogg lead a cadre of his PSO colleagues and pianist Robert Frankenberry in a concert aptly titled "Sonic Canvases," which featured compositions inspired by visual art and artists.

Sogg and Frankenberry opened the program with Joan Huang's "Galerie Chinoise Post-'89," a six-movement duet for bassoon and piano inspired by Chinese artwork of the post-Tiananmen massacre era.

Huang learned traditional music from local Chinese farmers when she was sent into agricultural labor for "re-education" during China's Cultural Revolution. After the revolution, she earned degrees at the newly reopened Shanghai Conservatory of music. In "Galerie Chinoise," she juxtaposes many of the folk tunes she learned on the farm with sophisticated counterpoint, chromatic lyricism and martialistic ostinato.

Flutist Damian Bursill-Hall and clarinetist Richard Page joined Sogg and Frankenberry for Thomas Oboe Lee's "Yo Picasso," five miniatures originally written for clarinet, viola, cello and piano, and re-scored by Lee for this performance.

The work depicts canvases from various periods and styles of Picasso's career. For "The Absinthe Drinker" from the Blue Period, the music was lyric, sullen and pleasantly bawdy, while the music for "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" was appropriately languid and sultry.

The concert's second duet for bassoon and piano was the world premiere of Paul Moravec's "Andy Warhol Sez:", written specifically for Sogg and Frankenberry.

Each of the seven short movements, with titles such as "Deeply superficial," "Andimated" and "Agreeably mechanical," is preceded by a Warhol aphorism read by the bassoonist.

The work's pithy wittiness was best exemplified by the movement whose preceding text expressed Warhol's desire to be told what to say by an interviewer. The piece is a rondo, with the piano (as interviewer) rigidly reiterating a theme and the bassoon (as Warhol) answering with droll variations.

Reynaldo Hahn's "Portraits of Painters" was a case of art imitating art in extremis. It was an arrangement for piano and winds by Sogg of a solo piano work based on four poems by Marcel Proust that were inspired by 17th-century paintings. The texture of the first movement was too crystalline to withstand the transfer to larger ensemble (Sogg, Frankenberry, Bursill-Hall, Page and oboist James Gorton). But the lyricism, flourishes and jocosity of the other three translated very well.

The concert closed with another world premiere: Susan Kander's "Museum Pieces," a quintet for bassoon and string quartet played by Sogg and violinists Huei-Sheng Kao and Dennis O'Boyle, violist Paul Silver and cellist Gail Czajkowski. The work depicts four of Kander's favorite artworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The music for Modigliani's "Reclining Nude" is patently sexual, with a shimmering viola solo symbolizing the title figure. Silver made the most of his opportunity, beautifully delineating languor, desire and tristesse. Disjunct meters and rustic airs give a humorous spin to Bruegel's "The Harvesters."

A concert comprising 26 miniatures is rife with the potential for repetition, if not monotony. But the players' collective nuance, shading and expression were always insightful and exquisitely appropriate to the various paintings or texts.