The Southbank Centre presents the UK premiere of Playing With Fire: An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang

This autumn, the Southbank Centre unveils the UK premiere of Playing With Fire: An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang, a major new mixed-reality experience and bold expansion of the piano recital, written and directed by Pierre-Alain Giraud. Combining live recital, visual art, mixed reality and virtual reality technologies with spatialised sound, the production places classical music in striking dialogue with virtual worlds, allowing an unprecedented perspective on the performance of one of the world’s greatest living pianists.

Running at the Royal Festival Hall from 9 September 2026 to 3 January 2027 as part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary year, Playing with Fire invites audiences to step inside a series of visual environments and precisely crafted sound worlds, shaped around the artistry of internationally acclaimed and Grammy Award-winning pianist Yuja Wang.

Produced by experiential arts collaborators VIVE Arts and Atlas V, the experience uses state-of-the-art volumetric capture to place visitors inside Wang’s recorded performance at a Steinway Spirio player piano. With VIVE Focus Vision headsets, audiences can move freely around her, encountering the thrill of a close encounter with Yuja Wang’s performance impossible in a concert hall, observing her virtuosity, precision and the exuberance of her playing.

Seamlessly shifting between mixed reality and virtual reality depending on the audience member’s proximity to the piano, the installation creates an unprecedented kind of emotional and sensory closeness to Yuja’s performance. Yuja Wang’s personally curated repertoire spans composers including Debussy, Ravel, Bach, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, forming a musical and visual journey through the many facets of fire as a symbol of human creativity. Visual environments transform in response to the music – serene night skies, molten primordial forms and dreamlike waterscapes – while fragments of Paul Verlaine’s poetry deepen the introspective atmosphere and chart pivotal moments of emotional development.