Staging at least two concerts per day for a month, the George Enescu International Festival invites and rewards stamina from its patrons. My Sunday began at 1pm, with Tarmo Peltokoski giving the upbeat to a captivating Die Zauberflöte, in a concert staging by Romain Gilbert at the concert hall of Romanian Radio. At 4.30pm, a second experience of Fin de partie (after hearing the UK premiere at the 2023 Proms) clarified the nature of Samuel Beckett’s play and György Kurtág’s sensitivity to its rhythm and imagery, as entirely occurring in the here and now: of pale refracted sunbeams over Lake Como, and the creak of an old rheumatic’s bones. When Nell and Nagg look back on their salad days, when Hamm and Clov argue in mutually destructive dependency, there is no sense of past or future, only of a present, and of time cut up like a salami into infinitely thin slices. At every turn, our instinct to connect and to understand is challenged.
The effort to understand and be present in the moment, literally as well as figuratively, proved too much for about a third of the audience in the Athenaeum, when they made a polite mass exodus after conductor Arnaud Arbet had signalled a brief pause in proceedings around an hour in, halfway through the opera, after the deaths of Nell and Nagg. The Enescu Festival had done well to secure the services of Arbet, who acted as the composer’s musical assistant for four years prior during the composition of Fin de partie, and conducted the premiere at the Teatro alla Scala. He surely knows the piece better than anyone save Kurtág himself, and (after a week of rehearsal) he coaxed the local musicians of the George Enescu Philharmonic into playing of palpable commitment. The cast of that 2018 premiere reprised their roles in Bucharest, with equal and complete authority: Hilary Summers and Leonardo Cortellazzi as the old couple Nell and Nagg, Leigh Melrose, manically tragicomic as Clov, and Frode Olsen, heroically sustaining the central role of Hamm.
The evening concert at the Sala Palatului featured the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in their second appearance at the festival under Manfred Honeck. The almost-obligatory Enescu piece on the programme was the composer’s early Sinfonia Concertante, featuring the winner of the cello division at last year’s Enescu Competition, Yo Kitamura. Over three continuous movements the cellist barely pauses for breath, excepting a central tutti, and Kitamura manfully grappled with Enescu’s octopus-like solo writing, while Honeck expertly sorted out the intricacies of the accompaniment. In an ideal world, perhaps, the GMYO would have played the piece at other stops on their 10-city, 21-day tour, rather than just taking coals to Newcastle, but they would have had their reasons: the jury is out on whether it is the piece to win new friends for Enescu.