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.