Peering into Schoenberg's dark wilderness

In Vienna around the turn of the century, not long after Freud began interpreting dreams, Arnold Schoenberg began writing music made up of them. Or so it often feels in the febrile world of the composer's early expressionistic works. With his Second Quartet, premiered in 1908, the composer had abandoned the safe harbors of tonality in search of a new language that would externalize his own burning inner states with unflinching truthfulness and unbridled imagination.

If one work captures the overheated expressive urgency of this period, it is Schoenberg's gripping monodrama "Erwartung," which James Levine conducted last night in his keenly anticipated return to the BSO podium after being away for well over two months. The soprano Deborah Voigt was the soloist in a richly rewarding program that offset Schoenberg with three Beethoven works: the Symphony No. 8, the "Coriolan" Overture , and the concert aria "Ah! Perfido."

But "Erwartung" (or "Expectation") was the rarity that made the evening memorable. Written with frightening speed during a two-week period in 1909, the piece is based on a libretto by Marie Pappenheim that brings us inside a woman's dazed journey through a bewildering forest in search of her lover. She eventually discovers his bloodied corpse and spins into a frenzied state of madness.

The libretto is a mysterious work full of ellipses and cries of despair. Schoenberg fashioned for it music of visionary brilliance that seeks to hover for a full half - hour within what the composer called "a single second of maximum spiritual excitement." But even that description suggests a sense of stasis, and this score is an endlessly churning ear-bender in which one senses the composer reveling in his newfound musical freedom. The 12-tone system that would organize this near-chaos still lay in the unknowable future and, at this moment, Schoenberg's work almost boils over with novelty and possibility. Webern once raved that "there is no measure in the score that doesn't demonstrate a completely new sound pattern."

Levine and the BSO rendered the immensely challenging score with exacting skill and remarkable transparency. Voigt's powerful soprano managed for the most part to cut through the orchestra, and proved equal to the demands of the work's eruptive lyricism. After the intermission, she returned in solid voice for "Ah! Perfido."

The orchestra sounded excellent in the "Coriolan" Overture and the Eighth Symphony. Levine led exciting, robust accounts of both works, combining focused energy with clarity and attention to detail. The Schoenberg/Beethoven pairing continues to be an illuminating one , but this two-year course in musical revolution concludes in March, when Levine will lead the orchestra , chorus, and soloists in Beethoven's "Fidelio." If his Met track record with this work is any indication, those performances are not to be missed.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.