Alba

Besetzung: Solo Tpt—3.2.3.2—3.4.3.1—(4 - 8)Perc—Hp—Pf—Acdn—Str

Uraufführung am 20.02.2015 in München: SO des Bayrischen Rundfunk, Ltg. Peter Eötvös, Marco Blaauw (Trompete)

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 it´s shadow, it´s 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.

Alba

before morning you shall be here

and Dante and the Logos and all strata and mysteries

and the branded moon

beyond the white plane of music

that you shall establish here before morning

grave suave singing silk

stoop to the black firmament of areca

rain on the bamboos flowers of smoke alley of willows

who though you stoop with fingers of compassion

to endorse the dust

shall not add to your bounty

whose beauty shall be a sheet before me

a statement of itself drawn across the tempest of emblems

so that there is no sun and no unveiling

and no host

only I and then the sheet

and bulk dead

(Rebecca Saunders)