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. A marvel of flavour and texture. As the work progresses the crumbs are swept together to form small heaps of what could almost be called music – tender, smudged portraits of each line, all shaded by instruments of the street. ‘Ah, hier,’ sighs Nell (the wonderful Hilary Summers) from her dustbin, a Russian accordion wheezing out the first bars of ‘Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’, from the film High Noon.

It’s easy to understand why so many worship at the feet of this 97-year-old Hungarian composer. Just listen to his use of the maracas, transforming this humble shaker into – if you can believe it – an instrument of emotional heft, as it periodically menaces the drama.

This is classic Kurtag. His obsessive tendency to boil everything down to a few gestures is a trademark. It would have been stranger if he hadn’t pulverised the orchestra.