Legendary pianist Marc-André Hamelin’s February 22 recital at Symphony Center was a major event in the promotion of profound and challenging American music. With characteristic precision and clarity, Hamelin presented a worthy interpretation of Charles Ives’s titanic Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord Mass., 1840–60) followed by Robert Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, Op. 12 and Alexander Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 4. In his performance of the Ives, Hamelin made the ethico-religious quest of American transcendentalism an audible phenomenon.

The Ives piece, commonly known as the Concord Sonata, is one of many masterpieces bequeathed by the composer to the treasury of American art music. The 50-minute sonata, first published in 1920, has the familiar four-movement structure of 19th-century symphonies and Ludwig van Beethoven’s longer piano sonatas, but any musical familiarity ends there. Individual movements lack traditional forms; thematic material is shared throughout the movements; and Ives intersperses tonal melodicism with explosions of atonal and polytonal pyrotechnics. Complicating matters, Ives weaves ample quotations into his musical texture, including Beethoven’s “fate” motif from his Fifth Symphony and American hymns. This harmonic and formal radicalism does not produce a sense of austerity, as in the work of some later modernist composers, but rather serves Ives’s dense, shifting musical collage. Besides the aesthetic complexity, the prodigious technical difficulty of the piece also does not lend it to being frequently performed.

The stated subject matter of the work may explain some of the harshness and grandeur of its musical language. Ives titles each movement after American literary figures: in sequence, “Emerson,” “Hawthorne,” “The Alcotts” (for Bronson and Louisa May Alcott), and “Thoreau.” When writing about the piece in Essays Before a Sonata, Ives identified mannerism as the great vice preventing talented composers from crafting great art. For Ives, the musical language of a piece must follow from the nonmusical content it expresses: images of nature, emotions, and, preferably, truths about life itself that it voices in sound. Thus, in “Emerson,” the almost overwrought sonority, violence, strangeness, and scope of the piece were all necessary to express the insight of the great American writer it tried to represent.

In the opening movement, “Emerson,” Hamelin shattered the anticipatory silence with the initial salvo of octaves moving contrariwise. Hamelin remained controlled through the movement’s many thorny and wonderful climaxes, which sounded like a fever dream of Beethoven. Then came the arabesque-like “Hawthorne” and tender “The Alcotts,” in which Hamelin’s knack for the soft and delicate side of Ives was manifest. The sonata finished with the meditative but icy “Thoreau.” Hamelin’s control in the lighter passages was matched by his skill in clarifying and weighting melodic lines in the piece’s often knotty textures, though there was a certain restraint in the climaxes that blunted their force.

The nature of the sonata form as programmatic or philosophical music warrants comment. Sometimes Ives’s representational strategy is clear, as in the menacing second movement, which refers to Hawthorne’s concern with sin, or the warm third movement, which evokes the Alcott family home. But the first and fourth movements undermine those representations. With “Thoreau,” Ives seems to want to strip clichés and sentimentality from our view of nature, as if to emphasize the novelty and directness of Henry David Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond. But how is the stormy first movement representative of the unwaveringly cheerful Ralph Waldo Emerson? Its thick dissonances seem unfitting for the sunny author who wrote in “Compensation” of every loss working for our benefit, or in “Circles” of every end heralding a new beginning. From Ives’s commentary on the piece, it seems that Ives’s Emerson is principally the prophetic Emerson of “The Over-Soul,” who declares the spiritual truth of oneness to be inside us. The first movement thus seems to be a constructive revision of Emerson, suggesting that the Emersonian inner self may not be placid but rather dark, aggressive, and irrational. (It is fitting then that Concord Sonata was published in the same year as Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which featured the identification of the “death drive.”) The whole piece is a sort of crazy farewell to the nineteenth century: we get snatches of Beethoven and Richard Wagner, the transcendentalists, and even the magic of the salon as the work drags the spirit of that epoch into the grunge and chaos of the twentieth century. For Ives, old truths may need to be spoken in newer, stranger words.

Hamelin followed the rarely performed Ives with Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, a relative staple. Although not nearly as musically transgressive as Ives’s piece, Schumann’s suite has a similar emotional restlessness and range. Hamelin’s performance was clear and polished, and he displayed a gift for the playing of melody. However, Hamelin’s tempo skewed too slowly in some movements, as in “Des Abends.”

The concluding Scriabin sonata seemed to mark a return to the Ivesian sound-world, at least with respect to the texture, chromaticism, and cyclic form. I, who was previously a Scriabin skeptic, was won over. With the concluding “Prestissimo volando,” it seemed that Scriabin had blown up the concert hall, that we had been rendered intoxicated, amorous, and were now racing down highways of memory and imagination. Hamelin succeeded in providing a breathlessly fast and dazzling finale. As a treat for the audience, Hamelin’s encore performance of Maurice Ravel’s “Jeux d’eau” may have been the most perfectly played work in the recital.

It can now seem quaint to remember that concertgoers were once scandalized by Beethoven’s Eroica or Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, so I was pleasantly surprised at the shock of the woman behind me by the end of the Concord Sonata. Hamelin’s performance of the Concord Sonata was an act of courage, both in the work’s technical demands and in its capacity to intimidate listeners. Piano recitals are often events of dusting off the same old Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt pieces that, charming and polished as they may be, have little to do with the feeling of contemporary life. Although Hamelin’s chosen sonatas of Ives and Scriabin are a century old, they felt modern in their abrasive intensity. The performance left me hoping that more pianists will present more challenging and vital music that stimulates and edifies audiences rather than merely gratifying their taste. Through his program, Hamelin effectively made the case for Ives as the last American transcendentalist, darker and more furious than his predecessors, but just as visionary.