Last All Saints’ Day—November 1, if that one’s not on your calendar—the petite, spiky, 30-something Beijing native Yuja Wang tiptoed onstage at the renowned Berliner Philharmonie in a bareback sequined microdress and you-tell-me-how-many-inch stilettos. Alongside her, almost a shadow, walked Víkingur Ólafsson of Reykjavík, 40, lankily owlish in suit and tie. The Odd Couple superstars of classical piano were pooling talents in a program anchored by Schubert’s goblin-haunted Fantasy in F minor, D. 49; Rachmaninoff’s rollercoaster Symphonic Dances; and John Adams’s ecstatic Hallelujah Junction—plus a shuffle of dances, marches, and miscellanea by the likes of Brahms, Dvořák, John Cage, and Conlon Nancarrow. As the live video shot on that occasion attests, the evening was, in a word, bliss.
A few stats may be in order. Wang has a following of nearly one million monthly Spotify listeners. Ólafsson recently clocked a career total of one-billion-plus streams and counting fast. They’re a pair of classical juggernauts—and while they’re not quite nipping at the heels of Taylor Swift (creator of 13 singles that have topped a billion streams each), the echelon they occupy is one many a rock star would envy. And both are recording artists with Deutsche Grammophon, which likely explains the new partnership.
Like a Kirkland and Baryshnikov of the classical space, Wang and Ólafsson deliver high drama with supreme refinement, though at times, the sparks of fun that arc between them smack of Calvin and Hobbes. Their quixotic playlist projects no manifesto about the meaning of the music. What holds it all together is sensibility and poetic instinct.
Defying convention, they open with Wasserklavier (Water Piano), the third of six miniatures the 20th-century avant-garde icon Luciano Berio explicitly designated as “encores.” The aquatic note is the perfect setup for the expansive fantasy by Schubert, whose evocations of brooks, lakes, and rivers no composer has surpassed. Wang’s pinpoint definition in the treble, Ólafsson’s plush unscrolling of the long bass lines, all blurred barely perceptibly in a touch of pedal, suffuse the music in a glow of candlelight. In Arvo Pärt’s little Hymn to a Great City, the pianos trade sounds of silver chimes and flashes of light on darting wings. Flurries in the Adams piece transport us inside a snow globe, anticipating another swirl of snowflakes in the boogie-woogie encore by one Alexander Tsfasman.
These aren’t performers who playact ecstasy, and listening to them with your eyes closed is already seventh heaven. Still, their immersion in the emotions of the music and also the evident pleasure they take in the composers’ craft are a treat to watch. That’s true when they’re playing at two instruments, one facing left, one facing right, in the grand concert-hall manner. But it’s even truer when they sit down on a single bench at one keyboard, reading from the same sheet music like friends in a drawing room, close enough for stolen glances.
”Yuja Wang & Víkingur Ólafsson: Live in Berlin” is available for streaming on Stage+
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
