In the 60s we would have called it a happening. Sponsored by the Celebrity Series of Boston and its generous donors Susan and Michael Tonis, star pianists Vikingur Olafsson and Yuja Wang brought their whirlwind tour to Symphony Hall Friday evening. The multi-sensory, total-immersion musical experience burst asunder the bounds of ordinary concert expectations. Rather than configure the two pianos in the conventional way, they lined up the keyboards with tails outward. Olafsson and Wang then sat side by side to face each other within reach of touch and intuitive communication, spreading their pianos out into the sapphire darkness like a joint pair of wings. It felt like hundreds of hands playing a 176-note keyboard. All concerns about pedal, balance and texture were solved by their single bold decision to favor a close, at times almost shocking intimacy in which personal polarity, seduction, contest, tenderness and ecstasy poured out unstoppably to a spellbound audience.

As a first act of subversion, the program opened with an encore, Luciano Berio’s brief Wasserklavier. Wang and Olafsson deployed the most outrageously exquisite tone-painting to evoke the mysterious solitude of rain drops spreading their circles to infinity. With only the slightest of pauses, Olafsson led Wang into Schubert’s love-making Fantasie in F Minor, effortlessly gaining her consent to give us a shared first theme of ravishing tenderness. They gave the second theme a propulsive, urgent energy. The contrast in dynamics served to deploy a tight embrace of the sublime and the beautiful, the fiercely decisive, and the utterly yielding; the themes magnetically unified into a tight and rapturous reciprocity. The scherzo brought a frolicsome respite to the intensity, with an amorous face à face in which “primo” and “secondo” simply rejoiced in celebrating love with a percussive sound as bright as brass. When the sorrowful first theme of the opening movement returned as an inevitable harbinger of finitude, Olafsson and Wang traded it back and forth probingly, only to infuse it with a new pulsating energy, unleashing a climactic ecstasy.

They drove us right into John Cage’s magnetic Experiences No. 1, to which they gave a mysterious, ascetic, meditative power. As though responding to each other across a 5^th dimension, they cut strategical silences into the continuum of sound, to make us, as Cage hoped, “susceptible to divine influences.”

Having listened to silence in its fully acoustic resonance in Cage’s work, the players invited us to play with the sound of gravity in Conlon Nancarrow’s marvelously kinematic, bluesy Studies for Player Piano No.6, arranged for two pianos by Thomas Adès. What godly feet are those that fall, unplanned and yet not wholly random, on the floor of heaven? What dancers intoxicate our imagination with rhythmic effects of superhuman complexity?

As though echoing Nancarrow’s fascination with externality, peals of chaotic bells sketched the beginning of an answer, plunging us directly into John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction. Propelled thrillingly towards the unknown and wrenching us out of complacency, Wang and Olafsson now bonded together through a face-off of radical bluster, equal-to-equal, shoulder-to-shoulder, eye-to-eye, before breaking into a more reflective configuration of waves and crosscurrents. The final part appropriated Nancarrow-like extreme rhythmic effects to create a mad race of energy spinning in place. Trampling the same moment of time and fragment of space into a wellspring of meaning, it finally provoked an immensely grateful Hallelujah as Wang and Olafsson exploited Adams’s marking “loco” to deliver a brilliant folie à deux, wrenching cries of joy from the breathless audience. As I said — a happening.

Did time return? Did intermission occur? Back at the keyboards with Arvo Pärt’s Hymn to a Great City, Wang (now in a sparkling golden dress) and Olafsson evoked the music of the spheres by emphasizing ripples of light, ethereal grace in a cosmic night teeming with spirits. Like a pendant to Cage’s meditative work, Pärt’s spiritualist minimalism provided a sort of inner haven of deep longing before the two pianists launched smoothly into Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. With distinctive fierceness they guided us by subtle phrasing, invoking the complex syncopation through which memories of the past reach us in whiffs, or assail us unannounced. Here, it felt as though “primo” and “secondo” expressed a private face à face between the composer’s aging, present self and his youthful past self, clustered around issues of loss. The andante waltz enhanced the complex rhythms into a mysterious Totentanz with a grotesquely exaggerated waltz rhythm, full of treacherous eddies and whirling vortices. Wang and Olafsson brought out the paradoxical modernism of nostalgia, where we experience loss as a sudden haven of loveliness in the midst of wild seas. Rachmaninoff’s arrangement for two pianos of his orchestrated dance suite brought out the modernist features. Our daring duo turned it positively jazzy in the finale ― but not before the two selves, past and present, became integrated and the two pianists mirrored one another, signaling a liberation from oppression and a new explosion of real joy.

Audience rapture elicited nearly a half hour of encores, which evolved from charming simplicity into outright joyous, giggly fun. The two pianists now side-by-side at one piano, though not quite on the same bench as Olafsson made a fun show of bringing over the other bench to accommodate his much longer legs. We were then bathed in gentle beauty in two of Brahms’s Op. 39 waltzes, then in a wonderfully played take on Dvořák’s Op. 72, No. 2 Slavonic Dance. Nobody can match Wang’s sparkling and elegant filigree and arpeggiations. Schubert’s Marche Militaire, D. 733, No. 1, looked and sounded outrageously playful, the two pianists competing with each other to show off their respective dexterities. With a final mutual delight in the pleasure of bringing this music to us they reveled in a spectacularly virtuosic traversal of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 1.

Leon Golub is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge and has been a lover of classical music for over 50 years.