Yuja Wang and Vikingur Ólafsson – two-piano recital

Two of the jewels in the Deutsche Grammophon crown of pianists, Yuja Wang and Vikingur Ólafsson filled the Royal Festival Hall with a programme including four-handed classics and twentieth-century American keyboard experimentalism –the duo is taking the programme on tour in the USA next year. The two pianist are in marked contrast to each other – the exuberantly coutured Wang and the sober-suited, rather owlish Ólafsson setting up all sorts of assumptions to do with style, profile and personality that these two exceptional artists constantly confounded in terms of who was supporting or flattering whom. Apart from a virtuosity you took for granted, the recital was a high-wire act of searching, ineffably detailed and fiercely intelligent musicianship, all projected without a safety net of caution or habit.
Both pianists can produce the softest presence of sound, as much palpable as audible, which suited the liminal quietness of Berio’s brief, Brahms-and-Schubert-inflected Wasserklavier (Water Piano). This leaked imperceptibly into Schubert’s famous Fantasia in F minor, one of the composer’s last works here given a symphonic sweep of epic tragedy and bleak remoteness. The first half ended with a sensational outing for John Adams’s minimalist explosion Hallelujah Junction, a piece that stretches human possibility to breaking point, delivered with uncanny, athletic spontaneity, anticipated in Thomas Adès’s arrangement for mere mortals of the sixth of the maverick American-Mexican Conlon Nancarrow’s Player Piano Studies, so hard they were written to be played mechanically and delivered here with breathtaking panache. The recital ended with Rachmaninov’s two-piano original version of his Symphonic Dances, which, under Wang and Olafsson’s rippling hands played off orchestral suggestion against form, rhythm and melody – the result was a revelation, which made even made these two break into a sweat. But that wasn’t really the end, with a generous six encores – for the record, a waltz Op. 39/2 and Hungarian Dance No. 1 by Brahms, Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance Op. 72/2, Alexander Tsfasman’s Snowflakes, Schubert’s Marche Militaire; and another Brahms Waltz, Op. 39 No. 15 – in which Wang and Olafsson’s rapport seemed even more relaxed, tight and impossibly connective. Superhuman or divine? Who knows?
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