Though the Metropolitan Opera opened its season this week, Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic were not about to cede the field of music drama entirely to their Lincoln Center neighbor. On Thursday, for the second program of his second season as music director, Mr. van Zweden led the Philharmonic in semi-staged performances of two shattering early 20th-century works: Schoenberg’s “Erwartung,” and Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle.”

Every aspect of the program was impressive, starting with the inspired idea to pair these pieces, and to play the seldom-heard Schoenberg at all. Mr. van Zweden drew taut, lucid, richly expressive playing from the Philharmonic in both scores. The three singers, especially the blazing soprano Nina Stemme in the Bartok, gave arresting performances. The staging by the director Bengt Gomer demonstrated how to make maximally dramatic use of minimal space.

The monodrama “Erwartung” (“Expectation”), which Schonberg wrote over 17 days of feverish work in 1909, has been called the first Freudian music drama. The text, written by Marie Pappenheim, a poet and doctor who was fascinated by Freud’s studies, is the stream-of-consciousness words of a distraught woman, who, jilted by her lover, enters a forest in search of him. Or so it seems.