Jacqueline Du Pre

This is not the classic 1965 Jacqueline du Pré / John Barbirolli / London Symphony Orchestra recording of Elgar's profoundly elegiac Cello Concerto. This is a previously unreleased live recording made by du Pré and Barbirolli in Prague two years later with the BBC Symphony. Is it as good? No, of course, not: the 1965 du Pré / Barbirolli recording has rightly been acknowledged to be the greatest recording of the work ever made – the most intense, the most passionate, the most compelling and far and away the most heart wrenching – and even in front of an audience of spellbound Czechs, Du Pré and Barbirolli cannot match that performance.

The tragedy of du Pré’s brief career is still fresh in the public memory and can be summarised here. She was born in Oxford on 26 January 1945 into a middle-class family in which music was important: her mother was a fine pianist and a gifted teacher. The French-sounding name came from her father’s Channel Islands ancestry. Just before her fifth birthday, when she was already showing musical promise, she heard the sound of a cello on the radio and the course of her life was set.

This disc, recorded live toward the end of Jacqueline du Pré's grievously short career, displays both her irresistible magic–the sumptuous, warm tone, the spontaneous immediacy of expression, the technical and emotional risk-taking born of total faith in her talent and musical instincts–and her unbridled excesses: the liberties, the extreme tempi and tempo changes, the passionate abandon, the incessant slow, sentimental slides.

The Elgar Cello Concerto and cellist Jacqueline du Pré are inextricably linked and this 1965 EMI recording of du Pré with John Barbirolli and the London Symphony Orchestra is the first great recoding of the work the ill-fated artist was to make. Barbirolli's invitation for the 21-year-old du Pré to perform the concerto thrust her into the international spotlight and remains one of her most cherished recordings.