Review: Vikingur Olafsson and Yuja Wang, Side by Side

When two pianists appear together in concert, the usual setup is for the curves of their instruments to hug in a yin-yang formation. The musicians face off across the expanse, some nine feet apart.

But when Vikingur Olafsson and Yuja Wang brought their starry duo tour to Carnegie Hall on Wednesday evening, just inches separated them. They sat side by side, their pianos splayed out in opposite directions like the wings of a butterfly, with the players in the middle.

Olafsson and Wang didn’t look at each other much during the performance, and Wang, who was closer to the audience throughout, did feel like the dominant presence and sound in this duet. But their physical closeness registered in a consistently unified approach to their richly enjoyable program.

There was balanced transparency in even the most fiery moments of Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor. Olafsson and Wang’s rubato — their expressive flexibility with tempo — felt both spontaneously poetic and precisely shared in the passage when serenity takes over in the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances,” with the yearning melody that’s given to the alto saxophone in the work’s fully orchestrated version.

Their styles were distinguishable, even if subtly. In sumptuously vibrating chords in the first movement of Schubert’s Fantasy, Olafsson’s touch was a little wetter and more muted, Wang’s percussive and as coolly etched as a polygraph. Cool, yes, but she could also be lyrical, as in the delicate beginning of Luciano Berio’s “Wasserklavier,” which opened the concert.

Short, gentle, spare pieces by Berio, John Cage (the early “Experiences No. 1”) and Arvo Part (“Hymn to a Great City”) gave the program a meditative spine. Those were interspersed with three substantial anchors: the “Symphonic Dances,” which Rachmaninoff set for two pianos as he was writing the orchestral version; the Schubert Fantasy; and John Adams’s “Hallelujah Junction.”