Every crumb of Kurtag’s music is a feast: Endgame, at the Proms, reviewed

The fun starts early in Beckett’s Endgame. Within minutes of opening his mouth, blind bully Hamm decides to starve his servant. ‘I’ll give you just enough to keep you from dying,’ he tells Clov. One biscuit and a half. Which feels positively lavish compared with what composer Gyorgy Kurtag feeds us musically in the first 20 minutes of his operatic adaptation (receiving its British première at the Proms). Crumbs, we get. One single lonely tone, from one instrument, every few seconds, all so spaced out that it almost sounded like the orchestra was on tiptoe, glutes clenched, attempting a heist perhaps, trying to half-inch some notes from somewhere.

But as Hamm says, ‘The bigger a man is the fuller and emptier’ – and Kurtag knows it. It’s one of the many miracles of Kurtag’s style that every crumb of music is genuinely a feast.