Playing with Fire

Equipped with a headset, the audience attends a virtual concert by the famous pianist Yuja Wang. At the center of the stage is a Steinway Spirio piano, acting as the bridge between two realms: the concert hall and the artist’s inner visions. This virtual piano recital offers an unprecedented closeness to the musician, allowing a deep appreciation of the stakes and intensity of musical interpretation. Visitors are free to walk around the piano and can observe the performer’s gestures, concentration, and the way music comes to life under her fingers. SENSORY CORRESPONDENCES Yuja Wang’s recital highlights the evocative power of music, where every note, like a spark, ignites the imagination. The performed pieces create visual tableaux where poetry, painting, and music engage in dialogue with Yuja Wang’s personal history. Renewing the act of listening while engaging the gaze, Playing with Fire turns “the correspondence of the senses” into experimental ground for a new form of concert. THE IMAGERY OF FIRE From Bach to Prokofiev, the works selected by Yuja Wang for this recital evoke the various forms of incandescence explored by Gaston Bachelard in his Psychoanalysis of Fire: the primordial and creative fire in Stravinsky’s Firebird, the sacred and transcendent fire of Bach, the devilish will-o’-the-wisps of Liszt, the gentle contemplative flame of Debussy’s Clair de Lune, crackling by the water’s edge, and the destructive fire of cannons in Prokofiev’s War Sonata. Playing with Fire is written and directed by acclaimed film and immersive director Pierre-Alain Giraud (winner of the Best Immersive Work Award at Cannes 2024) and produced by VIVE Arts and award-winning immersive and narrative-driven production company Atlas V in collaboration with production partner Lightroom, a London-based home for spectacular immersive shows from the world’s leading creative minds. Yuja Wang collaborated with Pierre-Alain Giraud and Icelandic visual artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir – longtime creative partners whose work has been presented at the Venice Biennale, Lyon Biennale, and Frieze Art Fair – as well as Academy Award-winning sound designer Nicolas Becker. The experience was created using 360-degree volumetric video capture and recordings of Yuja’s playing and voice, combined with advanced spatial audio, surrealistic animated visuals and the cutting edge of MR immersion using VIVE Focus Vision headsets.