3 hours ago
6
It might be the first time that a soloist at the Last Night of the Proms is simultaneously giving another performance in another London venue. Playing With Fire is an installation that lets the pianist Yuja Wang be in two places at once – or perhaps in two universes. Nine pieces of music conjure nine luminous dreamworlds for an audience wearing VR headsets: Disney’s Fantasia on steroids.
A collaboration between the pianist, the director Pierre-Alain Giraud and artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, produced by Vive Arts and Atlas V, it has already been seen in Cannes, Paris and Shanghai, and now has a home in London until new year.
Headsets on, we hear the click of Wang’s heels as her avatar emerges out of the pixels and walks to the piano stool. Then she begins to play. Or rather, the Steinway Spirio player piano in the middle of the room, programmed by Wang, plays – and we see digitised Wang play it. She begins with Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau, and after only a few seconds we are immersed, literally: water pools beneath the piano, then rises until we are submerged in a world of imaginary sea creatures. It’s enchanting, unnerving and in a way primal, all at once. After Debussy has led us to dry land again, Wang storms through the Danse Infernale from Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird as the blazing bird swoops over our heads and creatures made of lava dance madly around us: a wild rumpus with Wang calm yet ferocious at its centre.
Worlds morph into each other with distant seismic rumbles. There’s an icy white land evoking a cathedral for Bach’s prelude Ich ruf zu dir, an inferno in Liszt’s Feux follets. The two dozen or so people sharing the experience are visible, up close, as vaguely humanoid shapes made of water vines, or blackened rock, or – more disturbingly – flames. If that’s not unsettling enough, the penultimate immersive episode is a terrifying realisation of the frenzied finale of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No 7, one of his War Sonatas: villages burn on the horizon and drones skitter above.
It’s powerful stuff, and it has the potential to be overwhelming, or indeed to induce motion sickness. But seats are available at the edge – or stand close enough to the piano and the dreamworld disappears, revealing fellow audience members inching around the room in their headsets, but with Wang’s avatar still at the piano.
Finally we take the headsets off and listen to Chopin’s C sharp minor waltz, watching the piano keys and hammers move by themselves, readjusting ourselves to the mechanics of reality. It makes for an ending that’s slightly anticlimactic – but, given the weirdness and wonder of what’s gone before, it’s hard to think how it could be otherwise.
