Amazingly, Schoenberg has only been a CCM two times before, once in 2004 and once in 2005. As it's been over a decade, I think it's a good time to bring him back.

Schoenberg's Suite for Piano, op. 25 is one of the real landmark works in the literature. It is his first completely dodecaphonic work (he had some one-off movements before this). It is telling that he chose for this new adventure a type of work which would clearly pay homage to the musical heritage he came from, particularly the Baroque suite and its forms, and specifically Bach, whose name is woven into the row. Also interesting, at least to me, is that he only used the perimeter of what we'd call the matrix, lending it, in addition to the metric and rhythmic framework of each movement, a type of echo of Baroque suites, in which almost each dance is in the same key (except, perhaps, a second minuet or trio in the parallel key, for example). In the only 12-tone work I ever wrote (outside of little exercises in my youth), I paid homage to Schoenberg's homage (and its implications) by similarly restricting the theme of my set of variations to the perimeter; indeed, I called the theme, "Thema: Perimeter." I am not a Schoenberg expert, but I don't think he ever actually wrote a matrix, and certainly not with 0-notation. My understanding is that he literally wrote each form out.

At any rate, here is the beginning of the fun third movement from the Suite, the Musette. The pianist is that great promoter of modern music, Charles Rosen. This recording is from when Rosen was in top form, and is part of a nice, and not too expensive, 4-disc collection of "Modern Music" (though, at this point, "modern" is a bit of a stretch, as the work will be 100 years old in just a few years from now).