[Here’s a description from VIVE Arts of a presence-evoking virtual reality concert experience currently in London but on an international tour. See the original description for more images and details. Following below are selected excerpts from reviews in the Guardian, the London Evening Standard, and the New York Times. There’s also a 7:54 minute Behind the Scenes video on YouTube. –Matthew]

[Image: Credit: VIVE Arts and Atlas V]

Playing with Fire: An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang

September 8, 2026 to January 2, 2026 at Southbank Centre, London [more venues below]

In the virtual presence of renowned pianist Yuja Wang, the immersive installation Playing with Fire offers a new kind of concert experience. The chosen repertoire and the artist’s virtuosic gestures generate visual worlds that push the boundaries of musical performance and create a fascinating dialogue between the real and the digital, where sound becomes image and space comes alive with interpretation.

AT THE HEART OF INTERPRETATION

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.

International Tour:

Musée de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris, Paris: November 14, 2025 to May 3, 2026
Festival de Cannes Immersive Competition 2026, Cannes: May 12, 2026 to May 22, 2026
Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai: June 5, 2026 to July 31, 2026
Southbank Centre, London: September 9, 2026 to January 3, 2027
National Theater & Concert Hall, Taipei: October 10 to 24, 2026
Lincoln Center, New York City: January 30 to February 21, 2027

Produced by VIVE Arts and Atlas V, with production partner Lightroom
Technical team: Studio Albyon
Supported by Steinway & Sons, the CNC (Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée) and Pictanovo.

About Yuja Wang

Pianist Yuja Wang is celebrated for her charismatic artistry, emotional honesty and captivating stage presence. She has performed with the world’s most venerated conductors, musicians and ensembles, and is renowned not only for her virtuosity, but her spontaneous and lively performances, famously telling The New York Times, “I firmly believe every program should have its own life, and be a representation of how I feel at the moment.”

Yuja was born into a musical family and began studying the piano at the age of six. She received advanced training in Canada and at the Curtis Institute of Music under Gary Graffman. Her international breakthrough came in 2007, when she replaced Martha Argerich as soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Two years later, she signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon and has since established her place among the world’s leading artists, with a succession of critically acclaimed performances and albums. Her recordings have garnered multiple awards, including five Grammy nominations and her first Grammy win for Best Classical Instrumental Solo with her 2023 release of “The American Project.” For this she also won an Opus Klassik award in the Concerto category. 

—

[From the Guardian]

Playing With Fire review – like Disney’s Fantasia on steroids as a virtual Yuja Wang plays amid luminous dreamworlds

By Erica Jeal
September 11, 2026

[snip]

It’s enchanting, unnerving and in a way primal, all at once.

[snip]

It’s powerful stuff, and it has the potential to be overwhelming, or indeed to induce motion sickness. But seats are available at the edge – or stand close enough to the piano and the dreamworld disappears, revealing fellow audience members inching around the room in their headsets, but with Wang’s avatar still at the piano.

Finally we take the headsets off and listen to Chopin’s C sharp minor waltz, watching the piano keys and hammers move by themselves, readjusting ourselves to the mechanics of reality. It makes for an ending that’s slightly anticlimactic – but, given the weirdness and wonder of what’s gone before, it’s hard to think how it could be otherwise.

—

[From the London Evening Standard]

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

Yuja Wang’s mixed-reality piano experience at the Southbank Centre is a novel virtual experience that is occasionally exhilarating

By Nick Kimberley
September 11, 2026

[snip]

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.

—

[From the New York Times]

With V.R., Passive Concert Audiences Become Active Participants

Imaginative virtual reality projects in London bring listeners up close to the pianist Yuja Wang and let them perform with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

By Hugh Morris, Reporting from London
November 5, 2026

[snip]

Gabriela Fridriksdottir’s visual art is impressive, but it makes music just one stimulant among many. In that sense, “Playing With Fire” provides an intriguing commentary on classical music in the digital age: One of the world’s best pianists has to compete for attention even in her own recital.

[snip]

Wang’s performance has been captured in such detail that her hologram can be beamed around the room. Audiences, previously at a remove, can come as close as they like. But to concentrate solely on the mechanics of performance — absorbing the powerful physicality of Wang through “Feux Follets,” from Liszt’s “Transcendental Études,” in contrast to the limpid tones of the Chopin — was the kind of intensely focused opportunity that only this experience could grant.

[snip to end]