Ólafsson and Wang prove opposites attract at Symphony Hall

Boston Globe

24-02-2025

Ólafsson's performance attire of round glasses and natty but comfortable blazer could be described as 'chic professor,' while Wang's stagewear, much like her playing, wanted attention and was unafraid to seize it. Friday evening, she appeared in two gowns; a sparkly number reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe's 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President' dress, and a more avant-garde indigo piece with a high slit up the right thigh — the side facing the audience when she sat down, naturally. (She doesn't do coincidences.) Need I tell you who brought paper sheet music and a page turner, and who had scores on an iPad?
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But while Ólafsson and Wang might make for strange bench-fellows, they were anything but at odds in their approach to their two-piano program. The program of mostly 20th-century repertoire was characterized by an invigorating sense of playfulness and exploration, a feeling in which they were absolutely united.
The twin pianos were situated with the keyboards lined up end to end at center stage, while the bodies of the instruments pointed outward in opposite directions. Wang's instrument was in front, and accordingly she ruled over the higher range of the keyboard, while Ólafsson more often held down the rhythmic foundations in the rear. Heard against Wang's pianistic fireworks, which sparked the keys into rapidly blooming cascades of notes, Ólafsson's tone was mellow, smooth, rounded: water implacably murmuring over stones.
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The dusky beauty of Schubert's Fantasie in F Minor was followed up with a midcentury avant-garde twofer; John Cage's 'Experiences No. 1' and Conlon Nancarrow's No. 6 from 'Studies for Player Piano' — the latter arranged for human piano players by Thomas Adès. The Cage piece demanded surreal synergy, and the two delivered; the piece's irregular phrases didn't feel like they ended so much as they vanished into wormholes. In the Nancarrow, Ólafsson reveled in the bass line's askew rhythms while Wang's vaudevillian melody cartwheeled and leaped through the air.
Pianists Víkingur Ólafsson and Yuja Wang performing a two-piano program at Symphony Hall on Friday.
Robert Torres
In the past decade, both pianists have been muses for new concertos from American composer John Adams, who was represented on the program via the perpetual-motion vortex that is his 'Hallelujah Junction.' Here, in passages where the scores for the two pianos only differed by rhythmic offset, were the contrasts between Wang and Ólafsson illuminated most vividly. Both seemed to tap into volcanic energy, but where Wang's gestures exploded up and out, a la Vesuvius, Ólafsson gave the impression of a glowing molten overflow; two different flavors of unstoppable force, and woe to the would-be immovable object in their way. In the program's final piece, Rachmaninoff's two-piano arrangement of his own orchestral 'Symphonic Dances,' Ólafsson displayed the same propriety, care, and attention to detail with which one might converse in a second language, while Wang played with the fluent nonchalance of a native speaker.
Ólafsson
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There, they laid down two Brahms waltzes, then a Dvorak dance, then a Schubert march, and finally back around to Brahms. Some concertgoers (understandably) thought the show was over after the third encore, and they made it out the door into the brightly lit hallway before the opening strains of the Hungarian Dance No. 1 reeled them back in. Whenever Yuja Wang is involved, you can't be sure it's over until the house lights go up.
VÍKINGUR ÓLAFSSON AND YUJA WANG
Presented by Celebrity Series of Boston. At Symphony Hall, Feb. 21.
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