Alba - Rebecca Saunders

for solo trumpet and symphony orchestra (2014)

alba L. fem. of albus “white,” from PIE root *albho“white,” albe OE.

In painting, the most extreme bright and light achromatic colour to the point of absolute luminosity.

Devoid of shade and greyness, white is notably ardent, the colour of fury.

Alba is the final work in a series of three concertos: Still, Void and Alba.

Each title defines a condition, or state, of absence in relation to sound, to space and to colour, respectively, and each refers to a text of Samuel Beckett.

Taken from the collection Echo’s Bones, Alba is an intensely lyrical poem. Beckett weighs each and every word and its shadow, its echo.

This poem ends looking forward to the short and intense prose texts written at the end of his life: his profoundly reduced, almost skeletal, prose, both mercilessly direct and yet exquisitely fragile. 

Rebecca Saunders 

Samuel Beckett Alba