Review: Vikingur Olafsson and Yuja Wang, Side by Side

When two pianists appear together in concert, the usual setup is for the curves of their instruments to hug in a yin-yang formation. The musicians face off across the expanse, some nine feet apart.

But when Vikingur Olafsson and Yuja Wang brought their starry duo tour to Carnegie Hall on Wednesday evening, just inches separated them. They sat side by side, their pianos splayed out in opposite directions like the wings of a butterfly, with the players in the middle.

Olafsson and Wang didn’t look at each other much during the performance, and Wang, who was closer to the audience throughout, did feel like the dominant presence and sound in this duet. But their physical closeness registered in a consistently unified approach to their richly enjoyable program.

There was balanced transparency in even the most fiery moments of Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor. Olafsson and Wang’s rubato — their expressive flexibility with tempo — felt both spontaneously poetic and precisely shared in the passage when serenity takes over in the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances,” with the yearning melody that’s given to the alto saxophone in the work’s fully orchestrated version.

Their styles were distinguishable, even if subtly. In sumptuously vibrating chords in the first movement of Schubert’s Fantasy, Olafsson’s touch was a little wetter and more muted, Wang’s percussive and as coolly etched as a polygraph. Cool, yes, but she could also be lyrical, as in the delicate beginning of Luciano Berio’s “Wasserklavier,” which opened the concert.

Short, gentle, spare pieces by Berio, John Cage (the early “Experiences No. 1”) and Arvo Part (“Hymn to a Great City”) gave the program a meditative spine. Those were interspersed with three substantial anchors: the “Symphonic Dances,” which Rachmaninoff set for two pianos as he was writing the orchestral version; the Schubert Fantasy; and John Adams’s “Hallelujah Junction.”

An arrangement by Thomas Adès of Conlon Nancarrow’s Study No. 6, one of his ingenious player-piano exercises, somehow transformed complex rhythmic layerings into a blithe, tipsy rumba. Like the concert as a whole, it made virtuosity seem like pure fun.

Olafsson and Wang cleverly knit the pieces together. They moved without pause from the Berio into the Schubert, and opened the Fantasy in the same mood of soft mystery as “Wasserklavier,” the music only gradually taking on shape and definition.

Nancarrow’s delirious polyrhythms were the perfect teaser for the four-against-three beats of “Hallelujah Junction,” which began with Olafsson saturating the mix until Wang’s line could eventually be glimpsed through the textures. In the second section, they set washes of sound against pinpricks, and by the final section, the two were in a grand, sometimes stormy groove, swelling to organized chaos — later echoed in the half-crazed waltzes and climactic darkness-versus-light battle of the “Symphonic Dances.”

This being a Yuja Wang recital, even if only in part, there was a slew of encores: two graceful Brahms waltzes and one of his “Hungarian Dances,” one of Dvorak’s “Slavonic Dances” and Schubert’s cheerful “Marche Militaire.”

But even if it came well before the end of the program, the music that felt like an ideal encore was “Hymn to a Great City.” Part dedicated the score to two fellow Estonian émigrés with whom he stayed on a trip to the United States in 1984, when the piece was premiered at Lincoln Center.

It’s not quite clear whether the composer meant for the city in the title to refer definitively, or solely, to New York, and Wang and Olafsson have been playing it all over in recent months. But on Wednesday, with these two superb players sending out filigree flourishes like sparklers amid the calm, it had the concentrated sweetness of a local love letter.

Vikingur Olafsson and Yuja Wang

Performed on Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan.