Sakura No Yume means Sakura Dreams, or Dreams of Cherry Blossoms. The piece belongs to Auerbach’s recurring musical world of dream, memory and unstable perception, but its immediate origin is unusually concrete: Tokyo in the spring of 2016.

Auerbach introduced Sakura No Yume as an encore at the Tokyo Spring Festival on 27 March 2016. Contemporary Japanese coverage reported that she had been captivated by the beauty of the cherry blossoms and composed the piece the previous night. The same report heard in the music both the blossoms’ transience and their irresistible radiance.

The work’s brevity is central to its character. Its four-minute scale makes the music itself resemble the phenomenon it evokes: an image that arrives vividly, changes while it is being perceived, and is gone almost as soon as it can be grasped. In the cello-and-piano version, that transience is expressed through the contrast between the cello’s dark, sustained voice and the piano’s resonance.

• Sakura The Japanese cherry blossom becomes both image and temporal experience.
• Dream The title places the blossom inside Auerbach’s larger preoccupation with dream and memory.
• Impermanence The compact form turns disappearance itself into part of the work’s expressive meaning.

Sakura No Yume exists as three independently catalogued works: this 2022 version for cello and piano, a version for piano solo, and a version for viola and piano.