Upshaw and Kalish, at home with Ives

Anyone seeking the idyllic world of Charles Ives' Victorian-era New England may not find it (I've tried) in his now-urbanized hometown of Danbury, Conn., but could easily have stumbled upon it at Tuesday's all-Ives Dawn Upshaw/Gilbert Kalish recital presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society at the American Philosophical Society.

Though known as American's fearless, homespun modernist, Ives was represented here by seldom-heard, eccentrically crafted songs that create scenes from that world. Trivial details are heard in short postcard songs as well as in larger canvases that are impressionistic counterparts to Whistler paintings.

The downright cinematic "Memories A and B," dating from 1897, starts with a chattering child anticipating the show at the opera house as the band is tuning up, followed by what happens onstage - a Stephen Foster-style parlor song that's full of dignified melancholy. "Give Me Jesus" has Ives reharmonizing the famous spiritual in ways that put it on intriguingly less-stable ground.

Nobody is better equipped for this music than soprano Upshaw and pianist Kalish. Upshaw's specifically American way of projecting the English language is all but essential, but even more gratifying was her willingness to go where the music takes her, never keeping an objective distance.

In "Like a Sick Eagle" (based on Keats) she conveyed weariness with intentionally sagging pitch. The vocal precision that's always been her hallmark was perfect for "Ann Street," a brief, quirky song for a short, sunny street. Some of the more Whistler-esque songs such as the dreamy "The Housatonic at Stockbridge" were sublime. For "The Circus Band" she used a no-vibrato kid voice that never felt gimmicky.

The concert's main event was Ives' Piano Sonata No. 2 "Concord, Mass. 1840-1860," a 50-minute bear of a piece with four movements meant to musically enshrine Emerson, Hawthorn, the Alcotts, and Thoreau. Often, Ives seemed bent on outdoing Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" sonata with long, oblique passages that yearn to be hypnotic. Collage effects have a cakewalk spinning out of control and "Columbia the Gem of the Ocean" wafting about.

So much do I prefer the piece's descendants (Messiaen's Vingt Regards, Sorabji's Opus clavicembalisticum, and Michael Hersch's The Vanishing Pavilions) that I wonder whether the Concord Sonata is best appreciated when studied rather than heard.

Still, my ears stayed glued to Kalish, who has lived with Ives for the majority of his 79 years and eschewed technical flash and applied unflinching X-ray vision to the piece, with flutist Edward Schultz making a cameo appearance from the rear balcony with his short solo near the end.