Anton Nel is a Texan via Johannesburg.
“My heart was always here,” said Nel, the South African native who became an American citizen in 2003.
The Austin-based pianist will perform with the Dallas Chamber Symphony at the Moody Performance Hall in the Dallas Arts District on April 30.
Growing up on a farm in Johannesburg, Nel began playing the piano at age 10. His mother, a talented pianist and singer, recognized his natural talent and arranged piano lessons for him. As Nel performed and won first prize in all the major South African competitions as a teenager, his mother was his greatest supporter.
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“She was of the generation where those kinds of things were not to be pursued. She was supposed to get married and have a family and so on so when I took to it, she was just delighted,” Nel said.
He made his European debut in 1982 and came to the United States in 1983 to earn his Masters and Doctor of Musical Arts at the University of Cincinnati. In 1987, Nel won first prize at the Naumburg International Piano Competition at Carnegie Hall.
The Scene
Over the last four decades, he has performed in the United States with the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Seattle, and Detroit Symphonies. With his repertoire of more than 100 works for piano and orchestra, he has appeared throughout Europe, Japan, China, Korea, and South Africa.
“To be this person that can recreate all these masterworks and be the one to present it to people is really nice,” Nel said. “And I also love being onstage. There’s something wonderful about being able to read these little black dots on a page and somehow without you knowing it, can amuse, or move, or entertain people who have absolutely no understanding of it, but there’s something magical about that whole experience.”
One of his most unusual performance experiences was appearing in 33 Variations, a play by Moisés Kaufman at Austin’s Zach Theatre in 2013. Nel knows the pianist who performed in the Broadway production starring Jane Fonda. He suggested the show to Dave Steakley, Zach Theatre’s Producing Artistic Director.
The play is about a musicologist trying to understand Ludwig van Beethoven’s obsession with creating variations on a melody by Anton Diabelli as she struggles with ALS. Nel carved out months in his schedule to rehearse the variations. He appeared in each performance and was onstage for the entire show.
“I loved living at the theater,” Nel said. “It’s just one of those things I’ll never forget.”
Beethoven wrote the 33 variations as he struggled with deafness near the end of his life.
“The whole story was really interesting about how it came to be, and how he undertook the journey of writing this giant piece when he was only supposed to write one variation and was completely, madly obsessed with it. It was an interesting project to learn it,” Nel said. “I came out of it a different person.”
In his early 20s, Nel came to Texas to teach, joining the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. It was his first job out of school. Having benefited from extraordinary teachers and mentors such as Adolph Hallis, Bela Siki and Frank Weinstock, he chose to make teaching a major aspect of his career.
“I felt like it was something I want to start passing on early,” Nel said.
He taught at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Michigan. He also gives an annual series of masterclasses at the Manhattan School of Music and the Glenn Gould School in Toronto. During the summers, he is on the artist-faculties at the Aspen Music Festival and School, the Steans Institute at the Ravinia Festival, and the Orford Music Academy in Quebec. Now in his 38th year of college teaching, he is currently the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Chair at the University of Texas at Austin- Butler School of Music.
“The act of teaching, the act of transferring knowledge, especially one-on-one, you can make such a difference to the lives of people, even if they don’t take up music as a career. Anything you teach, anything you do as a musician, including discipline, the goal setting can be applied to your daily life. It’s very fun. I never tire of it,” Nel said.
During the first half of the Dallas Chamber Symphony’s concert, Nel will perform two pieces: Hayden’s Piano Concerto No. 11 in D Major and Schumann’s Introduction and Allegro Appassionato. The second half of the concert will feature Brahm’s Symphony No. 3 in F Major.
Hayden wrote at least 11 keyboard pieces.
“This is the last one and probably the best and it’s something I really, really love. It’s a piece that I’ve never actually played on the piano before. I’ve played it on the instrument it is written for many times: the fortepiano,” said Nel, an accomplished harpsichordist and fortepianist.
Nel calls the Schumann work his “desert island piece,” having first played it as a teenager after his music theory teacher gave him five volumes of Schumann’s work.
“It speaks to me,” Nel said.
Although he has gratefully played it several times onstage, Nel anticipates most audiences have not heard it performed live.
“For me, it has the absolute essence of Schumann in it,” Nel said. “It is super beautiful and exciting.”
Learn more: Dallas Chamber Symphony
