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Boston Globe
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Ólafsson and Wang prove opposites attract at Symphony Hall
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? Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 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. Advertisement 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 Advertisement 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. A.Z. Madonna can be reached at
New York Times
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Two Star Pianists, Thrillingly Side by Side
When two pianists appear together in concert, the usual setup is for the curves of their instruments to hug in a yin-yang formation. The musicians face off across the expanse, some nine feet apart. But when Vikingur Olafsson and Yuja Wang brought their starry duo tour to Carnegie Hall on Wednesday evening, just inches separated them. They sat side by side, their pianos splayed out in opposite directions like the wings of a butterfly, with the players in the middle. Olafsson and Wang didn't look at each other much during the performance, and Wang, who was closer to the audience throughout, did feel like the dominant presence and sound in this duet. But their physical closeness registered in a consistently unified approach to their richly enjoyable program. There was balanced transparency in even the most fiery moments of Schubert's Fantasy in F minor. Olafsson and Wang's rubato — their expressive flexibility with tempo — felt both spontaneously poetic and precisely shared in the passage when serenity takes over in the first movement of Rachmaninoff's 'Symphonic Dances,' with the yearning melody that's given to the alto saxophone in the work's fully orchestrated version. Their styles were distinguishable, even if subtly. In sumptuously vibrating chords in the first movement of Schubert's Fantasy, Olafsson's touch was a little wetter and more muted, Wang's percussive and as coolly etched as a polygraph. Cool, yes, but she could also be lyrical, as in the delicate beginning of Luciano Berio's 'Wasserklavier,' which opened the concert. Short, gentle, spare pieces by Berio, John Cage (the early 'Experiences No. 1') and Arvo Part ('Hymn to a Great City') gave the program a meditative spine. Those were interspersed with three substantial anchors: the 'Symphonic Dances,' which Rachmaninoff set for two pianos as he was writing the orchestral version; the Schubert Fantasy; and John Adams's 'Hallelujah Junction.' An arrangement by Thomas Adès of Conlon Nancarrow's Study No. 6, one of his ingenious player-piano exercises, somehow transformed complex rhythmic layerings into a blithe, tipsy rumba. Like the concert as a whole, it made virtuosity seem like pure fun. Olafsson and Wang cleverly knit the pieces together. They moved without pause from the Berio into the Schubert, and opened the Fantasy in the same mood of soft mystery as 'Wasserklavier,' the music only gradually taking on shape and definition. Nancarrow's delirious polyrhythms were the perfect teaser for the four-against-three beats of 'Hallelujah Junction,' which began with Olafsson saturating the mix until Wang's line could eventually be glimpsed through the textures. In the second section, they set washes of sound against pinpricks, and by the final section, the two were in a grand, sometimes stormy groove, swelling to organized chaos — later echoed in the half-crazed waltzes and climactic darkness-versus-light battle of the 'Symphonic Dances.' This being a Yuja Wang recital, even if only in part, there was a slew of encores: two graceful Brahms waltzes and one of his 'Hungarian Dances,' one of Dvorak's 'Slavonic Dances' and Schubert's cheerful 'Marche Militaire.' But even if it came well before the end of the program, the music that felt like an ideal encore was 'Hymn to a Great City.' Part dedicated the score to two fellow Estonian émigrés with whom he stayed on a trip to the United States in 1984, when the piece was premiered at Lincoln Center. It's not quite clear whether the composer meant for the city in the title to refer definitively, or solely, to New York, and Wang and Olafsson have been playing it all over in recent months. But on Wednesday, with these two superb players sending out filigree flourishes like sparklers amid the calm, it had the concentrated sweetness of a local love letter.
