REVIEW: Wang and Olafsson Team Up at Carnegie Hall

Feb 24

Feb 24 REVIEW: Wang and Olafsson Team Up at Carnegie Hall

Above photo by Fadi Kheir.

February 19, 2025

Two of today’s most in-demand concert pianists, Yuja Wang and Víkingur Ólafsson teamed up at Carnegie Hall for a collaboration that fused their disparate sensibilities into a grand soirée. This evening of piano duets hinged upon a conceptual juxtaposition of repertoire — culled from music composed for one piano-four hands, as well as two pianos — interspersing and attaching twentieth-century pieces to familiar classics. By the program’s conclusion, the occasion took on the casual air of an impromptu party around the piano.

Two pianos were arranged so that both keyboards were center stage, such that the performers were in close communication. Luciano Berio’s “Wasserklavier” from Six Encores for Piano (originally composed for solo piano, and arranged for two pianos for renowned duo Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale) was a suspenseful opening — a slow build up of tension and accumulative energy, like a dripping leak that presages a waterfall.

What flowed from there was Franz Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor, D. 940, a warhorse of the duet literature penned shortly before the composer’s 1828 death. Wang and Ólafsson, remaining at separate instruments (just as Gold and Fizdale did in their own playing of one piano/four hands repertoire), constructed a Fantasie symphonic in scope, with sweeping lines, and beautifully choreographed entrances and exits, as each player shifted from foreground to background, handing the melody back and forth. The Largo — a heraldic dispatch from Baroque oratorio — was a romantic, passionate cry. The ensuing Scherzo-like Allegro vivace was windblown and stormy — the water’s flow became a deluge — before ebbing for moments of reflection.

The two pianists couldn’t be more different. Wang reads from an iPad; Ólafsson has traditional sheet music and a page turner. But, their distinct qualities suited their duet parts, like Apollo and Dionysus — Ólafsson (on secondo, in the bass register) was grounded and detailed, a structural foundation, while Wang, on the primo, was anxious and bursting with spontaneity. The first half continued with three works by American mavericks.

John Cage’s Experiences No. 1, composed to accompany a solo dance by dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, is negligible and enigmatic, as if accompanying a mime. They segued directly into an arrangement by Thomas Adès of Study No. 6 by Conlon Nancarrow, who composed music for player piano. Together, the two winking pieces served as a charming palette-cleanser before the duo dug into one of the literature’s more recent standards, John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction.

Hallelujah Junction might as well have been composed for player piano, as well, for like Nancarrow’s mechanical creations, Adams’s score is so rhythmically complicated — with patterns and metric modulations only conceivable in the age of computer-based composition software — that most humans would crash and burn after a page or two. (Believe me, I’ve tried.)

But these virtuosos were undaunted, triumphantly delivering Adams’s kaleidoscopic tapestry of jazzy chords and nervous excitement with abandon. However, the piece remains unconvincing — its rock ’n’ roll-like focus on rhythm is limited in its use of the pianistic idiom.

Following intermission, Arvo Pärt’s chiming and decorative Hymn to a Great City was not plausibly evocative of New York City, but its emptiness was filled when the pianists slipped seamlessly into Sergei Rachmaninoff’s bouncing and bustling Symphonic Dances, Op. 45. The composer’s first iteration of this final major work, for two pianos, is said to have been performed by the composer and Vladimir Horowitz at a shindig in Beverly Hills. The ghosts of both Rachmaninoff and Horowitz hung in the air during Wang and Ólafsson’s glistening account. They made poetry of the saccharine denouement of the first movement, (Non) allegro. The evening’s high point was in the coloristic, motion-filled second movement Andante con moto (Tempo di valse), melancholy yet determined.

Following the work’s dramatic, and flawlessly executed finale, the duo indulged their well-sated audience in an exhaustingly generous series of encores, akin to the endless course of desserts at a four-star tasting menu restaurant. Two waltzes by Brahms, from his Op. 39, a Dvořák Slavonic Dance, more Schubert (Marche militaire in D Major, D. 733, No. 1), and more Brahms (Hungarian Dance No. 1 in G Minor) sent the audience into the night, stomachs full, and ready to put their feet up after so much dancing.