In VR, Yuja Wang Turns Concertgoers Into Participants

A 45-minute mixed-reality concert at London's Southbank Centre lets audiences watch a hologram of pianist Yuja Wang unwrap Ravel's "Jeux d'Eau" on a real Steinway Spirio player piano — while swimming through oceans, plodding through snow and watching gremlins spawn from a craggy mountainside. "Playing With Fire: An Immersive Odyssey With Yuja Wang" runs until January.

The critic's verdict is blunt: in this show, letting your mind wander is nearly impossible. Where an ordinary concert offers a quiet space for thought, this production is "unrelentingly stimulating." In 45 minutes, the audience member behind the review saw a cathedral grow around them and moved through eight fantastical virtual scenes in total.

Pierre-Alain Giraud wrote and directed the project, developed with VIVE Arts and Atlas V. It's the natural progression of Wang's earlier work with the immersive projection company Lightroom: in 2023, she played a series of sold-out shows surrounded by projections of iPad drawings by David Hockney. Lightroom returned for "Playing With Fire," which combines live audio with its eight virtual environments.

What does the show actually look like?

Audience members wear VR headsets. The hologram of Wang sits down at the actual Steinway Spirio (a self-playing piano) in the room and gradually unfolds the Ravel. Helpful voiceover quotes punctuate the performance — "Water," one says between pieces, "is a wet flame." Giraud has written that the show began with the idea of Wang, someone who "has always been described as fiery and flamboyant," and the scattered quotations expand that central fire theme into a survey of all the elements.

The program leans popular: Debussy, Chopin and Brahms, plus Prokofiev's Seventh Piano Sonata. The review finds Wang's playing exemplary — slippery through Debussy's "Bruyères," gently trickling through the closing Chopin Waltz in C-sharp minor, and "brilliantly singed" in a crisp rendition of the Prokofiev sonata. That elemental vocabulary, the critic notes, turns out to fit her playing precisely.

There's a catch, though. The pianism is "let down by a room more concerned with virtual experiences than acoustic beauty." In other words, the venue's setup privileges spectacle over sound — a real trade-off for a project built around a world-class pianist.

What does this change for classical music?

The piece frames the show as part of a broader shift: VR projects like this one turn passive concert audiences into active participants. Instead of sitting still and daydreaming, listeners constantly explore their surroundings — there is "always another surrounding to explore, or something curious to gawk at," even in the show's quieter stretches.

The review itself opens with a confession that cuts both ways. The critic does their "best daydreaming in concert halls" and prizes ordinary gigs for offering "a quiet space for thought and meandering reflection." Some performances are feats of complete absorption. "Playing With Fire" closes off that mode of listening almost entirely — which is exactly the point, and exactly the cost.

For audiences who want it, the Hockney-Lightroom lineage shows the model works commercially: those 2023 shows sold out. With VIVE Arts and Atlas V now in the mix, immersive classical programming is moving from projection walls to headsets. The open question the Southbank run leaves behind is whether the format can serve Wang's piano as well as it serves her persona.

"Playing With Fire: An Immersive Odyssey With Yuja Wang" continues at Southbank Centre, London, until January.