Playing With Fire at Royal Festival Hall: Ambitious virtual piano recital

Pianos that play themselves are nothing new. Player pianos, also known as pianolas, using punch-cards or piano rolls to activate the keys, date back to the 19th century. They were popular items, and not only as domestic entertainment: no less a composer than Stravinsky wrote for them.

As always, technology moves on; today, digital components have replaced cards and rolls. One result is Steinway’s Spirio player piano, introduced a decade ago and now playing a central and distinctly physical role in Playing With Fire, described as both “an immersive Odyssey” and “a mixed-reality concert experience”. Neither description is particularly enticing, but what gets the Spirio’s keys jumping are the hands of Chinese-American pianist Yuja Wang, one of the most gifted musicians performing today.

She has collaborated with writer-director Pierre-Alain Giraud to assemble a nicely varied programme of short pieces, her interpretations of which are reproduced (faithfully, we must assume) by the Spirio. Given that Wang’s performances are visually powerful, watching a digital piano play the pieces isn’t going to cut the mustard. Put on a virtual reality headset, though, and as if by magic, there she is at the keyboard.

Playing With Fire

Southbank Centre

But Playing With Fire has grander ambitions than simply creating a virtual piano recital. Girard has devised a kind of fantasy narrative to accompany the music, which, quoting Bachelard and Baudelaire, riffs on aspects of fire. It’s an ambitious framework but the show can’t really carry the quasi-philosophical weight he’s claiming.

The visual elements, designed by Gabriela Friðriksdóttir (who’s worked with Bjork), swirl and eddy around the room with the manic energy of a psychedelic cartoon. There are around 40 spectators at each performance, disconcertingly transformed by the headset into something akin to bowling pins waddling through the space. Otherwise the imagery aims to match elements of the music: the first piece Wang plays is Ravel’s “Jeux d’eau” (“water games”) and sure enough, watery images flood forth. Later, Wang seems about to be engulfed by flames, while at one point, the piano apparently rises into the air while the ground beneath our feet sinks, generating an unnervingly queasy feeling.

Wang’s playing, virtual though it may be, is as sensitive and precise as it always is, even if the sound system bestows a metallic timbre on the Spirio. There were moments when it truly did feel as if Wang was in the room: her account of a movement from one of Prokofiev’s War Sonatas had such power and energy that it generated a spontaneous round of applause, even though there was no one to acknowledge it. At other times, she seemed there and not there, an admittedly impressive simulacrum providing a wonderful accompaniment to an elaborate light show.