In the mid-1960s, England was undergoing an identity crisis. For many, the death of Sir Winston Churchill in January 1965, commemorated with all the ceremonial grandeur of a state funeral, seemed to mark the passing of an era. But even as Old England, with its connotations of Empire and Elgar, was following Churchill to the grave, a new England had already begun to celebrate its unrestrained youth, making its bold presence felt in music, art and politics. It was the era of ‘the end of the 
Chatterley ban / And The Beatles’ first LP’, as Philip Larkin cogently put it; in all but name, a cultural revolution. 

Seven months later, on 19 August, 1965, New England would fan the embers of a relic of Old England, producing a work that has burned fiercely ever since; in every sense, a true union of modernity and tradition. That unseasonably cool summer day, four miles from the Abbey Road studios where the ‘Fab Four’ were feverishly redefining post-war pop culture, Jacqueline du Pré (at just 20 years old even younger than her world-famous EMI stable-mates) arrived without ceremony at London’s Kingsway Hall in readiness for a performance that would take a work sensitively etched amid the values of the previous era – Elgar’s Cello Concerto – and give it a powerful modern twist.

Her free-spirited playing, with its bold rubato and wild physicality – all thrashing arms and tossed golden hair – would produce a recording that would rescue the music of Elgar from dusty Edwardian archives, revealing a voice that spoke profoundly and poignantly to new generations; it would be a performance that reminded its listeners of the haunting vocal qualities of the cello; it would be a performance that placed du Pré firmly among the ranks of the inspiring new generation that included Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Stephen Bishop and Zubin Mehta, all of whom she knew and worked with. 

Above all, it would be a performance that demonstrated how fresh ideas in tune with new times could breathe a living vitality into the achievements of a past culture which, from the era’s aggressively futuristic vantage point, appeared to be waning.

‘She was like a completely new image that came in the ’60s,’ recalls Moray Welsh, principal cellist of today’s London Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble that had accompanied du Pré in 1965 under the baton of Sir John Barbirolli. ‘She swept onto the scene with her incredible charisma. It was fresh. It really captured the whole generation, for the public as well as musicians.’ 

Jacqueline du Pré started playing the cello at the age of four, and at 13 the Elgar Cello Concerto was the first substantial concerto she studied. According to her biographer and fellow cellist Elizabeth Wilson, she bought the score on a Wednesday and by her Saturday lesson had already memorised the first movement and half of the second. It lived with her through the insecurities of adolescence and developed in her mind as her mastery of the instrument grew. When she performed the work at the Royal Festival Hall, on 21 March, 1962 the interpretation that was to be so memorably taped three years later was already in an advanced stage of formation. ‘If her interpretation had a fault it was that it missed Elgar’s characteristic vein of understatement,’ wrote The Daily Telegraph reviewer; ‘the work’s autumnal ambiguities faded in the light of such uncompromising ardour’.

She was immediately invited to repeat the concerto at the Chester 
Festival in June, and made her Proms début with it in August that year with Sir Malcolm Sargent and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, returning to perform it with him for the next four seasons.

To many, it seemed a near inevitability that a recording of this unique fusion of artist and repertoire would be both a critical and commercial success. Ironically, given its unstinting popularity in the four decades since its release – some half-million full-price sales in various formats, with a further boost to come with its first release at mid-price as a Great Recording Of The Century – EMI’s money men did not at first concur.

JKR Whittle, marketing manager of classical repertoire at EMI, was keen to point out potential parallels with the successful 1934 Yehudi Menuhin recording of the Elgar Violin Concerto, and apparently 
predicted a respectable 7000 sales. Together with producer Brian 
Culverhouse, he raised the suggestion that du Pré record it with Sir Adrian Boult. ‘Unfortunately there was no interest outside Britain, and because of the shortfall in the estimated sales return the proposal was rejected,’ recalls Malcolm Walker, then the label’s press officer. The next suggestion, that conductor Lawrance Collingwood, whose record ‘The Miniature Elgar’ had met with some success, record it, was also rejected again for commercial reasons. Then in 1964, while Sir John Barbirolli was at Abbey Road to assess some test recordings of artists with a view to casting The Dream Of Gerontius, Walker and Whittle approached him with the project, and he accepted. 

That Barbirolli ended up conducting it was highly appropriate. As a judge of the Suggia Gift award, which paid for du Pré’s cello lessons for six years from the age of 11, he had played a crucial role in supporting her musical development. Their first concert together had been the Elgar with the Hallé in April 1965 at the RFH. A cellist himself, Barbirolli had played in the LSO at the work’s première, and in 1921 had became the third soloist to perform it (Chris Parker, the recording’s engineer, recalls producer Ronald Kinloch Anderson saying to Barbirolli on the day of the sessions, ‘You know, you’re a cellist, you ought to make a record of this concerto,’ to which Barbarolli replied, ‘Ah yes, but who would conduct?’). The LSO and London’s Kingsway Hall were booked for three sessions; in the end, only two were needed. And so on Thursday, 19 August, 1965, one of the most successful classical recordings of all time was made.

Elgar’s last major work, the concerto was written following the slaughter of the First World War, its tones imbued with the dark shadow 
cast by the loss of both human life, and of a way of life. Its première in 1919, with Felix Salmond and the LSO under the composer’s direction, was a shambles, due partly to the lack of rehearsal time allowed by Albert Coates, who conducted the rest of the programme. The first two recordings were conducted by Elgar himself with cellist Beatrice Harrison. Important interpretations in the following decades include those by Pablo Casals, Paul Tortelier and André Navarra. (Casals’s muscular and idiosyncratic reading was criticised before the Second World War but praised afterwards, even though he says he performed it in exactly the same way; perhaps it took another slaughter to remind people how to listen to it). 

Those present at the recording session recall an atmosphere of congenial and well-regarded music making and modest informality. ‘The rapport between soloist and conductor in their first recording together was almost tangible: a real meeting of two cellists,’ says Walker. As was then the general practice, the recording was made in long takes – ‘She preferred it. Barbirolli certainly preferred it,’ says Edward Greenfield, who was also present at the sessions. ‘As I came out, there was Jacqui getting on her old anorak to go out,’ he continues. ‘I said, “Where are you going?” And she said, “I’m going round the corner to the chemist. I’ve got such a headache, and I want to get some aspirins.” They hadn’t even arranged a cab for her – she’d had to go into the street to hail a cab to Kingsway on her own. Star of the future. The following day one very grande dame was doing a recital, also for EMI, and she was pampered, and threw a great tantrum when they couldn’t get her a bottle of scotch in mid-afternoon.’

Likewise modest given the iconic status the recording has acquired over time, the original Gramophone review in December 1965 consists of just three small paragraphs – one of which is devoted to the concerto’s coupling, Janet Baker’s performance of Elgar’s Sea Pictures – sandwiched between far more substantial reviews of a Dvořák disc from Zdenek Chalabala and Karel Ančerl and the Czech Philharmonic, and August Wenzinger conducting the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Handel’s 12 Concerti Grossi. The critic, Trevor Harvey, was clearly impressed, however: ‘And now here is a recording of Jacqueline du Pré playing the concerto with which she made her name overnight. You have only to play a few moments of it, anywhere…to see how justly she deserved that success. Not only is every phrase eloquent – so is every single note… an interpretation that is not likely to be surpassed for many a day.’ Twelve months on, he placed it top of his critic’s choice for the year. Twenty-one years after that, when reviewing the recording’s digital transfer to CD, Edward Greenfield’s eye-witness enthusiasm had not altered with the passage of time. ‘In principle her espressivo may be too freely romantic, but the slow movement and epilogue remain supreme in their intensity, conveying in whispered pianissimos of daring delicacy an inner communion.’ 

Du Pré was an immensely physical performer, well captured on the films made by Christopher Nupen, which include a 1967 recording of her playing the Elgar with Barenboim and the New Philharmonia, to be reissued on DVD by BBC Opus Arte in August. Watching her play, you might almost be able to identify the exact point in the score through her body movements alone. At times she rolls around her instrument. At others her expression and demeanour almost seem absent, detached, 
as if beyond the music.

The physicality had always been there. William Pleeth, her teacher from the age of 10, said of her early playing that ‘her problem lay in the explosiveness of her temperament – sometimes she used herself too much physically,’ and he sought to adjust her bow grip in order to accommodate the pressure she applied to it while still retaining control.

Her freedom of movement was also reflected in her freedom with tempi, and a use of rubato which critics find inspired or excessive, according to taste. Barenboim, who conducted her in the work on many occasions, recalls that ‘she was very free in every way, with the dynamics, and with the tempo,’ though he adds that far from being contrived or out of keeping with the piece, ‘It was also completely natural, there was nothing wilful about it.’

John Georgiadis, leader of the LSO from 1965 to 1972 and again in the late ’70s, offers a contrasting memory of playing with her. ‘She was very dramatic – sometimes I almost found it a bit too much. And I think admiration sometimes mixed in with almost embarrassment. In those days there was more of a stiff upper lip. She let it all hang out, as they say. There would be a large dose of du Pré in it, whereas perhaps you might have hoped to have a dominance of Elgar.’

Elizabeth Wilson’s book contains a 1968 concert review by Stanley Sadie in which he finds himself longing for ‘a few seconds’ music where the rhythm was not like warm plasticine.’ But others saw in her often highly idiosyncratic playing such conviction as to carry it off. As Moray Welsh puts it: ‘The main thing about her was her incredible commitment to the music…Somehow, there was no other way for her to play it.’

Sadly, of course, we will never know whether there was another way for her to play it. Her career was brought to an end in 1973 by the onset of multiple sclerosis. There was to be no Glenn Gould-style overhaul of her interpretative vision; her aesthetic legacy will instead forever resonate with the vibrancy, hope and beauty of youth. 

In the years since du Pré recorded the Elgar Cello Concerto, both its popularity and the number of recordings of it have rocketed. ‘I think that the success of the recording has established the work around the world,’ says Steven Isserlis, who recalls receiving it as a Christmas present from his cello teacher in 1965 and describes it as ‘the first classical record that I really loved’. Barenboim goes further and credits her advocacy of Elgar as opening up the ‘whole new world’ of the composer’s wider repertoire for him and his colleagues.

Yet the very success of du Pré’s performance means that those who 
follow know that comparisons will always be made – particularly if 
they too are young and female, as Anne Gastinel, who recorded the 
work last year, acknowledges: ‘I think it was very difficult for everybody, especially for a new generation, to play this music without being compared with du Pré.

‘For me you can separate du Pré from the Elgar. I think it’s ridiculous to try to do it the same way as she did – it’s not possible. She was du Pré, she was unique. But it’s the same with the Dvořák Concerto – when you know the version by Rostropovich, it’s so difficult to propose something else.’ 

Other fine and often very different performances have come from, among others, Pieter Wispelwey, Yo-Yo Ma, two each from Heinrich Schiff and Truls Mørk, and one from Isserlis, who shows how a performance of the Elgar can be deeply emotional in an entirely different way to du Pré. If du Pré is anguished, breast-beating grief, shouting into the wind, Isserlis is meditative, evoking a grief that is tender, inwardly wounded. He readily admits that his view of the piece ‘is totally different. For me, the concerto is an old man looking backwards in regret and sorrow – I feel that all through the concerto, the sense of memory and loss. Whereas du Pré’s is a far more “present” experience. Of course I believe in the way I see the concerto, otherwise I wouldn’t play it that way! But I love du Pré’s approach to it; it is so utterly convincing, so heartfelt and moving, and above all, completely sincere – she is in love with the music.’ 

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