The director Peter Sellars and the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen have been collaborating since their landmark production of Olivier Messiaen’s supremely challenging Saint François d’Assise at the Salzburg Festival in 1992. Returning to the imposing Felsenreitschule—an equestrian arena from the Baroque period, carved into the cliff face of Salzburg’s Mönchsberg mountain—they are now pairing Arnold Schoenberg’s Expressionist one-act monodrama Erwartung (Anticipation) with Der Abschied, the sublime final movement of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. In the Schoenberg, a character called “A Woman” (Ausrine Stundyte, soprano) wanders distraught through a dark forest in search of her lover, whom she discovers dead. In the Mahler, a contralto (Wiebke Lehmkuhl) awaits a friend from whom she is about to take leave for ever. (The text spells out in no uncertain terms that the friends are two men, but Sellars seems to have a different scenario in mind.) Schoenberg and Mahler were close associates, working on these scores more or less simultaneously. How they will speak to each other remains, for now, Sellars’s secret—though there are hints that a feminist critique of Freudian theories of hysteria is in the offing. Each half of the program runs about a half hour, so unlike that Saint Francis special of decades back, this will be a short evening. —Matthew Gurewitsch