Alban Berg's Chamber Concerto (1923-1925) followed on the heels of the composer's greatly successful opera Wozzeck (1917-1922). Dedicated to Berg's teacher, mentor, and friend Arnold Schoenberg, the Chamber Concerto is a transitional work, marking the near-end of the composer's freely atonal period and approaching Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. The concerto, in fact, actually features a number of 12-note rows, though they are not yet used in a thoroughly systematic fashion. In the year following the concerto's completion, Berg finished the well-known Lyric Suite (1925-1926), his first extended work in the twelve-tone idiom. The Chamber Concerto is remarkable for the thoroughness of its organization; that is, it was composed with rigorous attention to minute details, and its structure is derived from a series of complex mathematical relationships. This is evident, for example, in the number of measures in each of the work's three movements. The first movement consists of variations that appear in alternating sets of 30 and 60 measures, totalling 240 measures; the second movement is exactly 240 measures long; and the number of measures in the final movement is equal to the sum of the measures in the first two (480). The work is both motivically and thematically highly integrated, with material from the first two movements returning in the final movement. The concerto is thus symmetrical and balanced in a manner associated less often with Berg than with Anton Webern, Berg's fellow Schoenberg disciple. The concerto has been described as a manifestation of Berg's early "constructivist" tendencies and is notable for the manner in which Berg combines atonal and twelve-tone music in the same work with ease.

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