LONDON: I do my best daydreaming in concert halls. Some performances are feats of complete absorption, but the more ordinary gigs offer something nearly as precious: a quiet space for thought and meandering reflection.
In Playing With Fire: An Immersive Odyssey With Yuja Wang, letting your mind wander is nearly impossible. Even in the troughs of this mixed-reality concert, at Southbank Centre in London until January, there is always another surrounding to explore, or something curious to gawk at. In 45 minutes, I swam through oceans, plodded through snow, saw a cathedral grow around me and watched as a craggy mountainside spawned a gang of nefarious gremlin creatures. It was unrelentingly stimulating.
This project, written and directed by Pierre-Alain Giraud and developed with VIVE Arts and Atlas V, is the natural progression of Wang’s work with immersive projection company Lightroom. In 2023, she played a series of sold-out shows surrounded by projections of iPad drawings by David Hockney. Lightroom has returned for Playing With Fire, which combines live audio with eight fantastical virtual scenes.
When I experienced it recently, other audience members and I wore virtual reality headsets that showed a hologram of Wang sitting down at the real Steinway Spirio player piano in the room, gradually unwrapping Maurice Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau. Giraud has written that the show began with the idea of Wang, someone who “has always been described as fiery and flamboyant.” Some helpful quotes scattered through the performance expanded the central fire theme into a survey of all the elements. “Water,” a voice said between pieces, “is a wet flame.”
Wang’s program, featuring popular-leaning classics by Claude Debussy, Frederic Chopin and Johannes Brahms, showed how choice those elemental descriptions are. Her playing – slippery through Debussy’s Bruyères, gently trickling through the closing Chopin Waltz in C-sharp minor and brilliantly singed in a crisp rendition of Sergei Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata – was exemplary, though let down by a room more concerned with virtual experiences than acoustic beauty.
Wang seemed of secondary importance to the project’s world-building. Gabriela Fridriksdottir’s visual art is impressive, but it makes music just one stimulant among many. In that sense, Playing With Fire provides an intriguing commentary on classical music in the digital age: One of the world’s best pianists has to compete for attention even in her own recital.
If you go by yourself, you are alone with Wang in the performance space. But if other audience members get too close to you, they suddenly materialise in your field of vision. When Wang flew into an arrangement of the Infernal Dance from Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird, people in my periphery turned from anonymous blobs into stony-faced monsters. The worst thing that could happen in this experience is for another human to intrude on your experience without warning; this technology encourages the idea that connection is something to be avoided.
On a second viewing, the concept shone through more. Wang’s performance has been captured in such detail that her hologram can be beamed around the room. Audiences, previously at a remove, can come as close as they like. But to concentrate solely on the mechanics of performance – absorbing the powerful physicality of Wang through Feux Follets, from Franz Liszt’s Transcendental Études, in contrast to the limpid tones of the Chopin – was the kind of intensely focused opportunity that only this experience could grant.
Playing With Fire uses a similar VR headset to the Philharmonia Orchestra’s imaginative Virtual Orchestra. In Britain, access to musical instruments for children is at a modern low, and orchestras have developed outreach projects to make up for some of the shortfall. Virtual Orchestra is a prototype – currently limited to percussion instruments, but seeking funding for a whole orchestra – and among the more inventive solutions.
Rather than replace education, it seeks only to inspire. And it does so with speed. In 45 minutes, players receive an introduction to musical notation, a lesson from a member of the Philharmonia and a rehearsal of Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell Overture. They are then thrust into performance onstage with conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali, in front of a virtual audience at the Royal Festival Hall.
As the timpani part flew past, I found myself in every former music student’s worst nightmare: sight-reading music onstage with a professional orchestra, on an instrument you don’t know. My heart rate rose considerably from the nerves. But for music educators, who might struggle to describe in words the visceral thrill of being part of an orchestra, this could hardly be a better way to taste the potential of music. Like Playing With Fire, the Philharmonia’s Virtual Orchestra turns what could be passive daydreaming into active, ambitious imagination. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
