Review: The starry spectacle of Yuja Wang and Vikingur Ólafsson at Disney Hall
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The Vikingur Ólafsson and Yuja Wang tour reached Walt Disney Concert Hall this week. Demand for the superstar pianists’ recital was such that Wednesday’s sold-out performance led the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which presented the concert, to add a second date. Not a concert to be missed by any living being who could be squeezed in, the Wednesday night performance had one patron exiting Disney carrying a small dog.
Two-piano teams tend to be for the like-minded. Pianists typically sit facing each other, so their eyes can meet, the pianos nestled together and the lid up on the rear instrument, creating in effect a double instrument of around 460 strings. Such rapport frequently leads to sibling duos (like the Labèque sisters) or husband-wife teams (like Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa).
Little of that, however, applies to the unlikely Ólafsson and Wang pairing. The introspective Islandic and dynamic Chinese Canadian pianists sat side by side at Disney, their pianos facing opposite directions, their heads turning to make eye contact only when needing to coordinate a climax. Keeping to type, Ólafsson chose the L.A. Phil’s old-school luminous Hamburg Steinway; Wang, the orchestra’s more glamorous New York Steinway.
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The acoustic result proved an immersive glory in Disney while still allowing for transparency and individuality of both the pianos and the pianists. Ólafsson’s full, liquid tone, particularly in the lower registers of the Hamburg keyboard, provided a rich, pillowy foundation for the sound, while Wang’s treble sparkled. Small quiet pieces became piano magic. Flashy big works offered massive piano immersion to a fault.
Thrilling — but also curious. The program included a little bit of everything, and the littler the bits, the better. To begin, the stylish pianists walked quietly on stage, sat down and instantly floated off into fanciful space with Luciano Berio’s two-minute “Wasserklavier.” Fingers barely graced keys in an evocation of the calmly rippling watery surface.
Concerts rarely begin well when they begin in stillness, but somehow the pianists instantly stunned an antsy audience into silence (no unwrapping candies, no dog barking). This flowed into the rhapsodic lyricism of late Schubert, his substantial Fantasia in F Minor. Wang conveyed a brightly percussive melodic delicacy, while Ólafsson answered with suave lyricism.
John Cage’s short, Satie-esque “Experiences 1” and Conlon Nancarrow’s tango-like Study No. 6, originally for player piano, then introduced John Adams’ “Hallelujah Junction.” To hear these in Disney had special significance for the venue. Written for two L.A. pianists, Gloria Cheng and Grant Gershon, “Hallelujah Junction” had its premiere in 1998 at the then-new Getty Center and was dedicated to Ernest Fleischmann. Without that imperious head of the L.A. Phil, who never took no for an answer, there would have no Disney Hall in which to produce the evening’s incomparable piano aura. It was Fleischmann who began Adams’ four-decade relationship with the L.A. Phil, something that the composer acknowledged at the orchestra’s latest Green Umbrella concert, dedicating it to Fleischmann in honor of what would have been his 100th birthday this past December.
Ólafsson and Wang captured subtle Cagean whimsy more readily than seductive Nancarrow shimmer before they went to town with “Hallelujah Junction.” Both pianists have a history with Adams. He wrote his glorious, grinding second piano concerto, “Must the Devil Have All the Great Tunes,” for Wang and his mellower third piano concerto, “After the Fall,” for Ólafsson, who premiered it with the San Francisco Symphony last month. But for all that, the pair barreled through “Hallelujah Junction.” They lacked the clarity and nuance of Cheng and Gershon, but Wang’s exhilarated rhythmic grooves had lives of their own.
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Magic returned with Arvo Pärt’s “Hymn to a Great City” in the second half. Presumably written for and premiered in New York in 1984, this tiny score takes no bites from the Big Apple. No car horns for the mystical Pärt, who didn’t make his U.S. debut for another two years (at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music outside of Santa Cruz). But prayer bells galore. Still, Pärt didn’t like what he heard and withdrew the hymn, only to revise it years later. As it now exists, it captures the supernatural tingle of little bells, as well as the heart-throb of gongs, all sounding off in the misty distance. Here the pianists pulled off a feat of witchery, as Pärt once did himself writing his Fourth Symphony (“Los Angeles”) for the L.A. Phil and Disney acoustic.
Ólafsson and Wang went on to bring out the darker bell-like qualities of the two-piano version of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. Even so, the gloom of Rachmaninoff’s final major work was dispensed by pure pianistic spectacle. The couple finally danced their way out of Disney with three encores. A Dvorák Slavonic dance and a Brahms Hungarian one were flirtatious and fun. Brahms’ Waltz in A-flat Major was lovingly exquisite.
But what might we have missed without that lucky pooch’s ability to hear higher frequencies of the ethereal bell tones? Even to limited human ears, they linger long.
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