“Today, Schönberg’s music is understood to be ultramodern hyperbole taken to a laughable extreme. In his homeland, he is treated simply as ‘der Fall Schönberg’ /The Schönberg case/, as though referring to some psychopathology.” Thus Antal Molnár wrote in the periodical Nyugat (1912), reflecting the general sense surrounding the work of Arnold Schönberg. A good century has passed since then and in the meantime Schönberg has become a music history classic, although there has still not been a full exposition of his oeuvre free of misconceptions and prejudices. This is partly the mission of this concert, which opens with his atonal Three Piano Pieces (1909) as performed by Gábor Csalog, a fine artist who has long demonstrated his commitment to modern and contemporary music. ‘Two figures pass through the bare, cold grove; the moon accompanies them, they gaze into it.’ These are the opening lines of a poem by German Richard Dehmel published in 1896, inspiration for Schönberg’s late Romantic string sextet Transfigured Night that premiered three years later. The concert winds up with a truly unusual item, Pierrot Lunaire (1912), in sprechgesang (spoken singing) style with small orchestra accompaniment: verses by Belgian poet Albert Giraud are delivered by mezzosoprano Klára Csordás who currently resides in Paris.