Anton Nel Thrills at the Sottile
Anton Nel
THE COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON’s International Piano Series has been bringing many of the world’s finest pianists to town for over two decades now. Series Director (and CofC Artist-in-Residence) Enrique Graf scored a major coup when he engaged distinguished South African pianist Anton Nel to deliver the opening recital of the series’ twenty-first season—which took place at the Sottile Theatre on Tuesday evening.
Nel immediately seized his fair-sized audience’s attention with his first selection: Spanish composer Enrique Granados’ spectacular showpiece, the Allegro de Concierto. This was big, bold virtuoso playing—with a natural flair for the Hispanic idiom that was surprising from this South African artist of probable Dutch descent. He tossed off the piece’s myriad technical challenges almost as an afterthought, while bringing aching romantic feeling and lyric intensity to its slower, more songful episodes.
Then it was on to an entirely different sound-world, in three selections from French impressionist master Claude Debussy’s Preludes for Piano: among the most evocative tone-paintings we have for the instrument. Nel led off with ‘The Interrupted Serenade,’ catching its inherent humor and frustration perfectly. He then offered the justly famous ‘Sunken Cathedral,’ realizing its craggy tonal suggestions of vast underwater spaces to profound and granitic effect. The set ended with ‘What the West Wind Saw’—one of the most virtuosic of the Preludes. Nel’s glittering technique was again in thrilling evidence as he dashed through this fiercely “windy” music. Sounding very much at home with Debussy, Nel tapped his rich palette of tone colors while exercising his pedal technique to produce dense clouds of saturated, overtone-laced sound.
Our artist then took us to intermission in the grand manner, with a deep and nobly expressive account of Ludwig van Beethoven’s magnificent (and beastly difficult) “Waldstein” sonata. From the brusque and ominous opening chord-patterns to the finale’s dreamy serenity and joyful triumph, Nel was in complete charge. His exquisite phrasing and often subtle dynamic shifts—along with his pronounced lyric-dramatic contrasts—made for a very special interpretation. I wonder if I’ve ever heard such smoldering, passionate Beethoven before.
After halftime, Nel returned to the stage for a winning assortment of pianistic plums by Polish expatriate composer Frédéric Chopin. The lovely Barcarolle in F-sharp was particularly welcome, as you don’t hear it very often in concert. Nel’s rendition of this (mostly) gently rocking “boat music” was well-nigh perfect—with singing tone, expressive elegance, and just enough rubato to lend the music a delicious sense of ebb-and-flow. Having played the Ballade No. 3 in A-flat myself, I was delighted to hear Nel have his way with it. He emphasized the piece’s epic qualities while effectively balancing its episodes of ominous brooding and thundering drama against its more relaxed moments of charm and whimsy. And he had absolutely no trouble conquering its thorny technical challenges.
Lighter fare followed with the three rather short Waltzes, Op. 64. Nel delivered the famous ‘Minute Waltz’ at a sensible tempo, allowing its joyously scintillating brilliance to unfold naturally. His traversal of the equally well-known second number, in C-sharp minor, conveyed the music’s aura of veiled, bittersweet melancholy especially well. His buoyant reading of the final A-flat waltz brought the set to a delightful close. Then—alas, too soon—he ended his generous program with the popular Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante: a happy pairing that offers marked contrasts between soft lyricism and flamboyant drama. His Andante section was a marvel of smooth and diaphanous piano “singing,” and the final Polonaise ended the work in a blaze of exuberant good spirits. Our enthusiastic ovation earned us a choice encore: Finnish master Jean Sibelius’s coolly melancholic Romance in D-flat.
Perhaps the best thing about Nel’s playing is his fearless tendency to take pianistic risks that often stretch his personal limits as a technician and interpreter. Not satisfied—like so many other keyboard artists—with mastering a piece and then performing it within the bounds of personal comfort, Nel allows the music to carry him away into levels of spontaneous passion and headlong, “damn-the-torpedos” momentum—often pushing himself to the very brink of control. Sure enough, he dropped a few notes in the process… but I’d trade an insignificant clinker or two for Nel’s brand of visceral, on-the-edge musical excitement any day.
Bravo, Maestro: your fan base now stretches to Charleston. Please come and play for us again.
