Twin Forces, Taking Chances

Fine Young Piano Virtuosos Yuja Wang and Víkingur Ólafsson Serve Up an Adventurous Program in Santa Barbara

Pianists Yuja Wang and Vikingur Olafsson appear together at the Granada on Feb. 28. | Photos: Courtesy

Considering the multiple virtues of the upcoming double-powered recital by Yuja Wang and Víkingur Ólafsson, at The Granada Theatre on Friday, February 28, the evening promises to be one of this season’s most exponentially pleasurable occasions. Aside from the acknowledged mastery and virtuosity of these young yet established artists, on one stage, their program is unusually provocative and leaps into the winds of adventurousness.

Hosted by UCSB Arts & Lectures, this program does include familiar repertoire pillars, with music by Schubert and Rachmaninoff, as well as the agreeable “medieval minimalist” Arvo Pärt and John Adams (his eloquently raucous Hallelujah Junction). More intriguingly, however, the pair will also venture into the rarified and modernist zones of John Cage, envelope-pusher Luciano Berio, and the Great American Maverick Conlon Nancarrow.

Nancarrow is notably missing in concert programming action duty, owing to the fact that his stunning body of work was written for player piano while self-exiling in Mexico City. In that his music can be hyper-complex in terms of polyrhythmic and polytonal materials, much of it is virtually impossible for pianists to replicate in real time. The player piano study this pair will perform, Study No. 6 (arranged by composer Thomas Adès), has the distinction of being a witty tango-esque invention with a teasingly infectious main melody. In keeping with Nancarrow’s wily spirit, the piece gradually spins off in circles of cathartic abandon before its tidy conclusion.

Both pianists have graced Santa Barbara stages in the past, and both artists have also been spotlighted in the Arts & Lectures Hear & Now series, which showcases emerging — and often fast-ascending — young artists making their local debut. By now, the Chinese-born Wang, 38, and the Icelandic Ólafsson, 41, have long since arrived and thrived in the upper echelon of living classical pianists.

Before his local debut at Hahn Hall in 2023, Ólafsson gave a powerful recital at the Ojai Music Festival in 2021, where his program swept across from the 17th to 21st centuries as sources.

Wang took on the lightweight and jazz-flavored album The American Project, with music by Teddy Abrams, in 2023. More importantly and more ear-bracingly, Wang was the fever-pitched soloist protagonist in John Adams’s exciting piano concerto Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? (a good question), recorded with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2020. (Listen up here).

As Wang explained in an interview we had a few years back, “I regularly explore contemporary works and will continue to do so. There’s a lot of repertoire out there for any pianist to discover, both new and old, and I plan to keep doing both.”

She continued, “I don’t look at western classical music or Chinese traditional music or sacred chants or hip-hop or any music having a stronger impact on me than another. It’s all about being inspired, and any genre will have those moments. I can be completely inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake one moment and later that day be equally inspired, maybe with different feelings, by listening to Rihanna.”

Wang also has a life outside of music: “There is a huge part of life that has nothing to do with music that can also stimulate your thinking and emotions, so I don’t want to seem like all I do or turn to for inspiration is music.”

Yuja Wang and Víkingur Ólafsson will perform in a piano collaboration on Friday, February 28, 7 p.m., at The Granada Theatre (1214 State St.). For tickets and more information, see bit.ly/3Qv3j1W.