Schoenberg's song cycle the Book of the Hanging Gardens is one of the most well-known works of early modernism, part of the creative burst in 1908 that took him over the threshold of atonality and into a new musical world. Every study of 20thcentury music discusses these 15 settings of poems by Stefan George, but the set as a whole is rarely encountered in recitals, making it seem remote rather than the landmark in the German song tradition of Schubert, Schumann and Wolf that it deserves to be.

But pianist Richard Goode's first appearance as an associate artist of the Southbank Centre for the 2007-8 season was to partner Dawn Upshaw in a recital that ended with Schoenberg's masterpiece. Upshaw's dauntless musicianship, her confidence in tackling the thorniest musical challenges, is part of her appeal as a singer; this was a typically full-on engagement with these elusive songs, whose emotional trajectory is just as lucid and poignant as those of Schubert's Schöne Mullerin.

It's the piano that most often reveals the emotional turmoil beneath the surface of these songs, and Goode's focused intensity caught Schoenberg's vivid mood changes perfectly. If there were moments when the vocal lines ideally needed something plusher than Upshaw's rather edgy upper register, her total identification with this overheated world more than compensated.

She had been equally at home in Berg's Seven Early Songs, which nibble at the edges of the tonal world that Schoenberg would blow apart a few years later, while Goode had played the chromatic tendrils of Berg's Op 1 Piano Sonata in a way that pointed to unlikely connections with the world of Scriabin. A group of late Schubert songs, including the delectable Im Frühling and Suleika, received the same wholehearted presentation that was hard to resist.