When Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse announced this fall that rock legend Lou Reed would be performing his nearly forgotten 1973 solo album, “Berlin,” over four nights in December, it came both as a complete surprise and an utterly logical progression.

It was a complete surprise because the record was not warmly received upon its release 33 years ago, which may explain why Mr. Reed has never performed it despite an enduring solo career. The former Velvet Underground leader, whose solo career was still finding its footing in the three years following to his departure from the band, may have smarted from the critical response. Also, he isn’t the sort of artist who routinely mines his past. During his 36-year career as a solo performer, Mr. Reed has typically forged ahead, finding new sentiments and musical configurations. On 1975’s “Metal Machine Music,” for one notable example, he created an industrial, atonal wall of sound that was surely meant to give devoted listeners a splitting headache.

That said, it seemed like a mere matter of time before “Berlin” got the concert treatment. Perhaps as a response to the song-oriented download market, entire albums — especially those from the 1970s — are increasingly becoming the focal point for concert presentations. Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira,” Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew,” Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks,” and many others have been performed track-by-track in recent years by an eclectic mix of the artists themselves and musical descendants.

But none of those classics have received the kind of presentation that “Berlin” is getting this weekend. The Arts at St. Ann’s will present the album in its entirety tonight through Sunday, with Mr. Reed and his band joined by a choir directed by Antony of Antony and the Johnsons, additional vocals by local funkster Sharon Jones, arrangements and orchestrations by Hal Willner, and sets by Julian Schnabel. The trumpeter Steven Bernstein and the cellist Jane Scarpantoni, a member of the Reed band, will also be featured.

Thirty-three years ago, when “Berlin” was brand new, it would have been preposterous to anticipate this kind of treatment. The record, Mr. Reed’s third solo effort, was the follow-up to the hugely successful “Transformer,” which was produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson and featured career-defining hits “Perfect Day” and “Walk on the Wild Side.” The record won him rave reviews and a new cache of clout.

But rather than capitalize on that momentum, Mr. Reed created a somber song cycle that related the story of two drug-addled American ex-pats living in the divided city, which functioned as a metaphor for their tortured souls, separated by a wall of experience and pain.

The story was a fictional “Sid and Nancy,” with kids in the mix and with a deeper sense of depression and personal despair. Yet it featured all of Mr. Reed’s extraordinary songwriting gifts. His lyrics make the characters’ addictions seem like logical choices for facing a horrific reality (“Imagine making love by proxy,” he sings in character). Their failed struggle is a constant quest for life with some sort of visceral sensation, but their quest fails miserably and that failure is rendered in some of the most harrowing and depressing sounds ever committed to wax.

Although the record fit perfectly with the artistic mood in American popular arts, such as social realist soul music and American new-wave cinema, “Berlin” was widely panned upon its release. Rolling Stone wrote: “There are certain records that are so patently offensive that one wishes to take some kind of physical vengeance on the artists that perpetrate them. Reed’s only excuse for this performance … can only be that this was his last shot at a once-promising career.”

But by the end of the decade, the magazine had issued a stunning mea culpa, declaring, “It’s not an overstatement to say that ‘Berlin’ will be regarded as the ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ of the ‘70’s.”

For Mr. Reed, though, the initial reception of “Berlin” had toughened his response to criticism. “You just have to remember that maybe the audience is deaf,” he told me two years ago in an interview before a Carnegie Hall show.

At the time, Mr. Reed was starting to look back at his catalogue of work. The cause, to his considerable surprise, was the rise of dance music. Some obscure tunes of his from his late Velvets period and his solo discs from the early ’70s were being remixed, and the producers were seeking permission for release. Their results left him fascinated with the precision of sound in modern dance music and hip-hop. “Listen to some of this stuff on headphones so that you can hear it all; the drum sound on Missy Elliott or the layers of stuff on Outkast are amazing!”

At the time Mr. Reed was planning a tour of opera houses in Europe with his band, and he had recently completed “The Raven,” which was commissioned by St. Ann’s. In retrospect, with all these threads converging, this production of “Berlin,” which, unlike his other ‘70s work, is a unified song cycle that focuses heavily on character arc, might have been foreseeable. It is Mr. Reed’s most theatrical record.

Although a fair amount of huffing and puffing has been done about this music being performed in its entirety for the first time, several of the songs have been in Mr. Reed’s touring repertoire for years. The thrill of this show will be to hear all of it in sequence for the very first time anywhere.

And of course, there’s an extra perk: Mr. Reed has said he will include five older songs to the set list. Which five? That’s a carefully guarded secret.

mjohnson@nysun.com