Elgar 85 Cello

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.

New Zealand composer Gareth Farr wrote his cello concerto after discovering some family history. His three great uncles left New Zealand to fight in France in World War I. All three were killed within weeks of arrival. Farr’s concerto is instantly accessible and is a dramatic and emotional statement.

In April of 1996, Ofra Harnoy entered the venerable Abbey Road Studios in London with the London Philharmonic Orchestra to record Edward Elgar’s great cello concerto. Unfortunately, shortly after this event, the end result did not end up where it was supposed to be and was not released to the public. In fact, the whereabouts of the recording went unknown for quite some time, afterward.

Cellist Jacqueline du Pré needs little introduction to most listeners. Whether as a result of being perhaps the most prominent female cellist in the last century, her meteoric rise to fame at a young age, the equally rapid decline of her career at the hands of multiple sclerosis, or simply the incredible passion with which she performed, du Pré possessed a singular capacity to make an impression on her audiences. She was single-handedly responsible for reviving the long-dormant Elgar concerto that was to become one of her trademark pieces.