A real grand piano stands before the listener. The keys begin to move — but there is no one at the instrument.
A person puts on a virtual reality headset, and the space changes. Beside them appears a digital image of the pianist Yuja Wang. She plays so close that you can study the movement of her hands, walk around the grand piano and see the performance from a vantage point unavailable to the audience of an ordinary concert hall.
Then the hall itself disappears. The music unfolds through water and fire, leads to the night sky, plunges into volcanic depths and fills the space with fantastical creatures.
This is no longer a concert recording or a music film. It is an attempt to create a new form of encounter with sound — a space the listener can step inside.
When the grand piano becomes a portal
15 September 2026 the British version of the project opens at the Royal Festival Hall of London's Southbank Centre Playing With Fire: An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang — “Playing With Fire: An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang.”
The project brings together classical music, virtual and mixed reality, spatial sound, visual art and poetry. A session lasts about 45 minutes, and visitors can move freely around the grand piano or stay in place, watching as the physical space merges with the digital.
The project was created by VIVE Arts and Atlas V together with Lightroom. The London run will continue until 3 January 2027 and is part of the Southbank Centre's 75th anniversary programme. The event's official page
The screenwriter, director and creative director is Pierre-Alain Giraud — a winner of the Cannes Immersive programme. The visual worlds were created by the Icelandic artist Gabriela Friðriksdóttir, known for fantastical images in which the human body, natural forms and mythical creatures seem to belong to a single mutable reality.
The spatial sound design was developed by Academy Award winner Nicolas Becker and Antoine Martin.
It is important to clarify: this is the British premiere, not the project's first showing. Playing With Fire opened 14 November 2025 at the Musée de la musique — Philharmonie de Paris, and was subsequently presented at other international venues.
The pianist who is not in the hall
At the centre of the space stands a real Steinway Spirio — a high-tech concert grand piano capable of reproducing a pre-recorded performance, together with the subtlest differences in the force, duration and character of each keypress.
When the music begins, the keys and pedals move as if an invisible performer were seated at the instrument.
After the viewer puts on the VIVE Focus Vision VR headset, a three-dimensional digital image of Yuja Wang appears beside the grand piano. Volumetric capture technology was used to create it: many cameras recorded the pianist from different points in space, making it possible to present her not as flat video but as a three-dimensional figure within the virtual world.
The visitor can approach the instrument, walk around it and study the playing from different sides. Depending on the person's position, the project shifts from mixed reality, where the digital image merges with the real hall, to a fully created virtual space.
Yuja Wang is not physically present at every session. And yet her movements, her interpretation, the dynamics of her touch and musical time remain.
An unusual paradox arises: the performer is absent — the performance continues.
Nine works — nine worlds
For the project, Yuja Wang personally selected nine works by Bach, Chopin, Debussy, Ravel, Liszt, Stravinsky and Prokofiev.
Each of them receives its own visual space. Jeux d’eau by Ravel carries the listener into an underwater world. Stravinsky's music unfolds amid flames and volcanic forms. In other episodes, cold landscapes, the night sky and fantastical creatures that defy ordinary physics appear.
The images do not merely illustrate the music. They become a visual response to its timbre, energy and movement.
Lines by Paul Verlaine are also woven into the fabric of the journey. The poetic fragments link the individual parts, adding verbal images to the music without turning it into a single predetermined narrative.
The fire in the project's title becomes more than an element. It is an image of creative energy — a force that destroys the familiar form so that something new can be born from it.
Can one draw closer to a performance?
In an ordinary concert hall there is a clear boundary between the musician and the viewer. The performer is on the stage, the public in the hall. Even a listener in the front row sees the playing from only one vantage point.
In the virtual space, this distance can be changed. The visitor approaches the grand piano, watches the pianist's hands from the side or from above, and finds themselves almost inside the performing gesture.
Closeness in itself does not yet guarantee depth. An abundance of visual events can distract from the sound and diminish that freedom of imagination which a traditional concert leaves intact.
But the new format makes it possible to notice what is usually hidden by distance: the precision and speed of movements, the tension of the wrists, the position of the body and the moment the fingers touch the keys.
Music appears not only as sound but also as physical action.
Where reality ends
Playing With Fire invites the viewer to move between several layers of presence.
The real grand piano remains in the room. Its keys really do move. The music really does sound. But the pianist appears only in a digital image, and the surrounding world can at any second turn into water, flame or a fantastical landscape.
The project does not erase the boundary between reality and illusion — it turns it into part of the work.
We understand that we are seeing a pre-recorded image, yet the body responds to its spatial closeness. The mind knows that the pianist is not there, but perception for a time agrees with her presence.
The grand piano becomes a material bridge between two worlds. If you approach the instrument, the virtual landscape recedes, once again revealing the real hall — but the digital Yuja continues to play.
Music holds reality and imagination in a single space.
What role does artificial intelligence play here
The organisers point out specifically: artificial intelligence tools were used in creating and scaling the visual material.
However, the digital image of Yuja Wang does not improvise and does not make independent artistic decisions. The musical interpretation was performed and recorded in advance by the pianist herself. The grand piano reproduces her playing, and the volumetric image reproduces the real movements captured during filming.
AI in this case became a production tool, but not the author of the performance.
This is an essential boundary. Technology preserves, transforms and spatially unfolds human work, yet at the centre of the project remains a specific musician with her own tempo, touch and artistic choice.
Will the live concert disappear?
The appearance of a digital double of a great pianist inevitably raises an anxious question: will such technology become a replacement for the live musician?
For now, there is no basis for such a conclusion.
A live concert remains an inimitable encounter. The musician feels the hall, responds to the acoustics, to the presence of the audience and to his or her own state. Even the same programme sounds a little different every time.
The immersive project offers a different experience: the chance to re-enter a performance that has already taken place, to draw closer to it and examine it from within.
This is not a replacement for the live concert, but a new form of musical memory.
The recording no longer remains a flat trace of the past. It acquires space, scale and the ability to surround the listener.
The concert of the future, or a beautiful illusion?
Not everyone will want to experience Bach or Debussy among digital beings. One person needs the silence and concentration of a concert hall, another needs a space in which sound meets colour, movement and imagination.
Critics note the duality of such an experience. Some virtual worlds intensify the impact of the music, while others are capable of overloading the attention. The use of VR can also cause dizziness, nausea or sensory fatigue in some visitors — the Southbank Centre warns about this in advance.
Technology opens up new possibilities, but at the same time it sets an important condition for artists: the visual image must enter into a dialogue with the music, not obscure it.
That is why the main experiment of Playing With Fire lies not in demonstrating the capabilities of VR.
It tests whether technology is capable not only of astonishing a person, but also of leading them to more attentive listening.
Music no longer remains before us
For centuries the concert was built around a familiar boundary: the performer was on stage, the listener in the hall.
Playing With Fire dissolves that boundary. Sound moves around the person, the grand piano preserves the pianist's touch, and the music unfolds through water, fire and moonlight. But we do not enter a separate world created for us. That world arises in the very encounter between music and our perception.
And here Debussy's music joins with the lines of Paul Verlaine that inspired Clair de lune:
"Your soul is a chosen landscape,
where charming masks and dancers wander,
playing the lute and dancing —
almost sad beneath their fantastical costumes."
Perhaps the new form of concert merely makes visible what has always happened. Music does not exist separately from the one who creates it and the one who hears it. The performer, the instrument, the sound, the space and the listener become participants in a single event.
There is no external world here that one must enter.
There is no music that can only be observed from the sidelines.
There is a single space of sounding, in which music recognises itself through the human being, and the human being — through music.
