Jacqueline Lagagé

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.