Playing with Fire — An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang blends live piano performance, visual art, spatialized sound, storytelling, and immersive technology to offer unprecedented closeness to one of the world’s most celebrated pianists — Yuja Wang.
Playing with Fire — An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang reframes the concert as an immersive encounter. Blending live-performance capture with mixed reality, the installation transforms virtuosity into environment: gestures generate shifting visual worlds, and music unfolds in a dialogue between the physical and the digital—where sound becomes image and space itself seems to respond.
“As a performer, I am constantly seeking new ways to connect emotionally and creatively with audiences through music… to be able to marry art and technology with this new immersive installation is really a dream come true.”— Yuja Wang
The technology is never an end in itself. Director Pierre-Alain Giraud frames the work as an extension of Yuja Wang’s artistic vision: “Through Playing with Fire, we create an experience that matches her spirit — using cutting-edge technology not as a gimmick, but as a way to reveal how each piece connects to our universal human stories.”
“Using cutting-edge technology not as a gimmick, but as a way to reveal how each piece connects to our universal human stories.”— Pierre-Alain Giraud
Visual worlds by Gabríela Friðriksdóttir and spatial sound by Nicolas Becker expand the experience into something fully sensory, while a repertoire from Bach to Prokofiev traces both musical history and Wang’s personal journey.
Visitors enter a darkened gallery wearing HTC VIVE Focus Vision headsets. In mixed-reality mode, the physical space and the virtual world overlap: they can watch a holographic Wang perform at the very piano before them, circling her freely, drawing close enough to study the tension in her wrists, the breath before a phrase. No concert seat has ever offered this.
Wang recorded the entire Playing with Fire repertoire on a Steinway & Sons Spirio in London in September 2024. Wang’s performance is captured in extraordinary detail, preserving nuances of timing, dynamics, and pedaling, then replayed on the physical instrument in perfect sync with her volumetric presence. As the keys and pedals move with lifelike precision, the piano appears to perform in real time, creating a seamless fusion of recorded gesture and live experience. Visitors can move freely around the instrument, observing her technique, concentration, and the exact moment music comes to life under her hands.
Spanning Bach to Prokofiev, the program traces multiple expressions of fire — creative, sacred, playful, and destructive. From the primal energy of Stravinsky to the introspective glow of Debussy and the volatility of Prokofiev, each piece ignites a distinct visual and emotional landscape.
Unfolding as a visual and sonic tableau, where poetry, painting, and music intersect with Wang’s personal narrative, the installation reimagines the act of listening as something spatial and exploratory, turning the “correspondence of the senses” into the foundation for a new kind of concert form.
Produced by VIVE Arts and Atlas V, with production partner Lightroom. Creative team: Yuja Wang, lead artist; Pierre-Alain Giraud, writer, director & visual director; Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, visual director & original artwork; Nicolas Becker, sound designer; Philippe Berthomé, lighting designer; Laurence Fontaine, installation designer. Technical team: Studio Albyon. Yuja Wang appears courtesy of Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft.
