Prom 43

Endgame (2011-18) [UK Premiere]

Scenes and monologues; opera in one act by György Kurtág; Libretto by the composer after Samuel Beckett’s Fin de partie

Semi-staged performance; sung in French with English surtitles

Hamm – Fred Olsen (bass), Clov – Morgan Moody (bass-baritone), Nell – Hilary Summers (contralto), Nagg – Leonardo Cortellazzi (tenor), Victoria Newlyn (stage director)

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra / Ryan Wigglesworth

Royal Albert Hall, London

Thursday 17th August 2023

Royal Albert Hall, London
Friday 11 August 2023

by Richard Whitehouse photos by Sisi Burn / BBC

It may have had to wait three years since being postponed from the 2020 season, but tonight’s Prom brought a first hearing in this country for György Kurtág’s opera Endgame after Samuel Beckett and a performance such as, in the event, delivered at least as much as it had promised.

Although seeing Fin de partie on his first visit to Paris in 1957, it took several decades before Kurtág felt able to tackle a full-length opera and only in 2010 was a formal commission made by La Scala – presaging seven years of sustained (and evidently torturous) activity prior to its Milan premiere in November 2018. The subtitle is ‘Scenes and monologues; opera in one act’ and, having set 60% of the original French text, Kurtág still intends to add further scenes but, now in his 98th year, it would not be surprising were this opera to remain in its present form.

Unfolding continuously (and with no interval) across almost two hours, Endgame consists of 14 scenes which hone Beckett’s already sparse drama down to an unremitting focus on its four characters in their undoubted hopelessness and seeming helplessness. Vocally the predominant idiom is a speech-inflected arioso conveying its text with acute clarity against the backdrop of an orchestra which, despite – perhaps because of – its size and diversity, is almost always used sparingly. Stylistically the music invokes those traits familiar from its composer’s work across six decades which are not diluted as rendered in new and unlikely contexts; one notable aspect is the oblique while always audible allusion to those earlier composers who have accompanied Kurtág over his life’s work, and that here emerge as ‘figures’ all but tangible in their presence.

Utilizing three of the four singers from the Milan production, the cast could hardly have been stronger in commitment or insight. His being even more the defining role than with Beckett’s play, Frode Olsen here conveyed the predicament of Hamm with an authority the greater for its restrained vulnerability. He was abetted in this by Morgan Moody, whose Clov was poised between servant and protégé for a portrayal always empathetic however great its exasperation. Leonardo Cortellazzi summoned deftly whimsical humour as Nagg, reconciled to his dustbin-clad fate in contrast to the bittersweet recollections of Nell as taken by Hilary Summers – her eloquence extended by a later Beckett poem in a touching prologue. Victoria Newlyn brought the stark stasis of the drama and expanse of the Albert Hall’s acoustic into persuasive accord.

A versatile and perceptive conductor (and no mean opera composer, witness his ENO drama The Winter’s Tale six years previously), Ryan Wigglesworth duly had the measure of Kurtág’s elusive if inimitable idiom and drew a fastidious response from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; its playing as attentive to the score’s many subtleties as to its emotional highpoints – not least the closing bars, whose wrenching dissonance speaks of catharsis at least as much as of tragedy. The composer will hopefully have had an opportunity to hear this performance.

One looks forward to an eventual staging of this opera in the UK (following those subsequent productions in Amsterdam and Paris). Whatever else, Endgame is the summative work which Kurtág had to write and as confirmed tonight, the effort in its realization has not been in vain.

For more on the 2023 BBC Proms, visit the festival’s website at the BBC. Meanwhile click on the names for resources relating to György Kurtág and Samuel Beckett – and on the artist names Ryan Wigglesworth, Frode Olsen, Morgan Moody, Hilary Summers, Leonardo Cortellazzi, Victoria Newlyn and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra