Kurtág’s Fin de partie triumphs at the Enescu Festival!
7 September 2025 — The Romanian premiere of Fin de partie, featuring the four singers from the Milan world premiere and the Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra, was a resounding success.
Both press and audience unanimously praised the concert version of Kurtág’s opera at the Romanian Athenaeum.
Arnaud Arbet’s key role in the opera’s creation was highlighted in a joint interview with György Kurtág and in a feature published in the Festival magazine.
Photo Andrada Pavel
Joint interview with György Kurtág and Arnaud Arbet (Budapest, April 2025; Paradigma Film for the George Enescu International Festival).
Interview by Irina Vasilescu for the George Enescu International Festival magazine.
PRESS
« 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. (…) 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. »
bachtrack, 9.9.2025
« In György Kurtág’s opera ‘Fin de Partie’, (…) the George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra under Arnaud Arbet sounds far more vital and lush, and thus overall more attuned to the difficult opus than the Staatskapelle Berlin, which played with analytically dry beauty at the premiere at the Lindenoper in winter 2025. »
nmz, 10.9.2025
« The original cast was also invited, exceptional performers who enriched this subtle musical escapade with their stage movements. A very expressive opera with a broad, colourful orchestration, harmonised with the vocal lines, with an emphasis on the stage action. (…) Therefore, we had the operatic feast we were looking for, and which we only find at the Enescu Festival (…) Conductor Arnaud Arbet, a specialist in modern and contemporary music, took to the podium. He is an old acquaintance from the 2023 edition, when he conducted Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre to great acclaim. 5 out of 5 stars ».
presshub, 17.9.2025
« The George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra of Bucharest, conducted by Arnaud Arbet, sounded impressive. (…) The orchestra took care of every detail down to the last millimetre. This is not surprising, because Arnaud Arbet, a composer as well as a conductor, collaborated with Kurtág as his assistant for five years on the composition of Fin de partie, and the composer himself publicly acknowledged his ability, his knowledge of opera from recent decades (he conducted Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre at the 2023 Enescu Festival with this same orchestra) and the help he had given him with Fin de partie, starting with helping him find the singers for the premiere, the same ones who sang on this occasion. »
mundoclasico, 6.10.2025
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