Many music historians would name Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” as the watershed work of the 20th century, but they are wrong. Ultimately much more influential, albeit relatively unheralded at the time, was the String Quartet No. 2 of Arnold Schoenberg, written five years earlier and featured in the final program of the season in the series “Artists in Concert” Friday evening at the Metropolitan Museum.

Schoenberg was so confident of his place in the forward march of art that he actually fashioned this piece as a history of music written from a future perspective. The first two movements are conventionally tonal, while the third and fourth sections include a female voice, which intones the expressionistic poetry of Stefan George and smashes 300 years of tonic-dominant bonds to feel, as the poet puts it, the air of a new planet.

The resident group (Laura Frautschi and Colin Jacobsen, violins, Nicholas Cords, viola, and Edward Arron, cello) gave this music a creditable reading, crisp and precise if not warm and emotive. Mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger, somewhat of a Schoenberg specialist, handled the seemingly impossible intervallic leaps of Litanei with ease and notable fluidity, sounding positively tender in the final Entrueckung (rapture) and suitably self-effacing in its last statement.

Being a contemporary composer was not a very lucrative business, so Schoenberg first worked in a bank in Vienna and then accepted the position of manager of a cabaret. When his club needed some new material, who better to get the gig than himself? Hence the Brettl-Lieder of 1901, little globs of Viennese pastry a shade naughty textually but not particularly inventive musically. Those who expected Joel Grey may have been sorely disappointed, but Ms. Nessinger did a nice job with these bagatelles. Her pitch, however, seemed to waver in direct proportion to her volume. She was accompanied by Jeremy Denk at the piano.

Surrounding these glimpses of fin-de-siècle life in Vienna were two works from the glorious tradition, one a genuine rarity and one that is simply not performed often enough. Schubert’s Adagio and Rondo Concertante for Piano Quartet is a charming little essay and the group presented it as such. It was an ideal curtain raiser to set the tone of life on the Danube as essentially facade.

Finally, Max Mandel joined as additional violist in Johannes Brahms’s String Quintet in F major. Somehow, the two quintets, perhaps the densest and most remarkably blended of the master’s work for strings, have been bypassed by the sextets. They are not nearly as substantive and were written much earlier in the career of Brahms. This evening, the first of the two received an energetic reading, with the opening Allegro non troppo ma con brio realized at a brisk pace.

One of the signature qualities of this particular ensemble is its clarity and audibility of all voices, but occasionally, as happened in the Grave ed appassionato, the price paid is a lack of warmth and the banishment of vibrato. This version was missing some of the appassionato, but all ended well with a lively and colorful Allegro energico leading to a furious Presto.

Schoenberg was also a painter of renown, but showings of his work outside Vienna, Austria are less frequent than performances of the Schubert on this program. Perhaps someday the Metropolitan can mount a joint exhibition, combining the visual with the aural.

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Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink as the Academy of Ancient Music presented two contemporaneous programmatic works about water by the two Baroque masters George Frideric Handel and Georg Philipp Telemann on Thursday evening at Zankel Hall.

The Academy was founded in 1973 by Christopher Hogwood, one of the acknowledged leaders of the period instrument movement and a conductor who branched out to present some of the most interesting concerts of 19th-century music in memory. Mr. Hogwood has led the Academy from its inception, and any attempt to replace him would seem, at least in Britain, very cheeky indeed.

But this is exactly what has happened this season, as Mr. Hogwood has moved on to emeritus status and former chorister and current harpsichordist Richard Egarr has assumed the controls. Judging by this one event, the ship is outfitted for smooth sailing ahead.

The program opened with two of the concerti grossi from Handel’s Opus 3 and immediately established the high energy of the group, most of whose members stood throughout. To be sure, these are original instruments, but Mr. Egarr, in harmony with his predecessor, is not prone to excessive elimination of perceived musical excess. There is room here for some individual phrasing decisions and emotive technique.

Overall the sound was delicate but precise, slightly raucous as befits the material, and abundantly room-filling. The opening pieces were very spirited, the B Flat major notable for some fiddling of a decided Celtic flavor, the D Major graced by a transitional movement composed by Mr. Eggar and theorbo player William Carter.

Most listeners have at least a passing acquaintance with Handel’s “Water Music,” but few are conversant with Telemann’s suite “Hamburger Ebb und Fluth.” It is more substantive than the Handel and contains 10 sections depicting the escapades and attributes of the various watery gods. The overture is straight out of the French suite tradition of Lully, in fact foreshadowing some melodic lines from Rameau’s later opera “Platee,” but in its description of the volatility of the moods of the deities it reminds more of Mozart’s “Idomeneo.” Now filled out with flute and soprano recorder, the Academy burgeoned to 17 members.

Perhaps the most affecting movement was the sarabande portraying the sleeping goddess Thetis. It precedes the bouree that chronicles her awakening, a rousing that may have been engendered by the ominous rumblings of thunder whose origin in this small quiet band was at first quite mysterious, until we realized the source was actually on the other side of the basement walls. A rollicking hornpipe, known as a canarie, ended this suite on a particularly exuberant note.

Representing the Handel cornucopia of suites collectively known as “water music” was the whisper quiet G Major, HWV 350. Here the dignity of the ensemble shone through, even as the extraneous noise seemed to escalate. Rachel Brown was featured as the flute soloist, and was then joined by Rachel Beckett for a ripping account of Telemann’s Concerto in E Minor for Flute and Recorder, instruments that, in this early 18th century era, sounded remarkably alike. The final presto was quite thrilling.