There are recordings that document a performance, and then there are recordings that document something closer to a confession — and this is the second kind.
Jacqueline du Pré was twenty-two years old when she walked into the sessions for this record in 1967, and she already played the Delius Cello Concerto like someone who had been carrying it for decades. The piece itself is peculiar: late Delius, composed in 1921 when the composer was already blind and largely paralyzed, dictating notes to his amanuensis Eric Fenby. It doesn’t develop so much as drift, suspended in a kind of amber light, all long valedictory lines and harmonies that don’t quite resolve into anything you can name. Most cellists treat it gently, as a curiosity. Du Pré treated it like the only piece that mattered.
The Sessions
The recording was made with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Malcolm Sargent, one of the last major projects Sargent would complete before his death that same autumn. There’s something fitting about that — two people both, in different ways, near the end of something, making music about a composer who was himself composing from the end. The EMI engineers captured du Pré’s sound with a directness that still stops me. That lower register, the way she found weight without ever sacrificing movement. She makes the cello sound like it’s breathing.
The coupling on this original release was the Elgar Cello Concerto — also du Pré, also 1967, also EMI, that time with Barbirolli and the London Symphony. The Elgar is the one everyone knows, the one that gets talked about in hushed tones at music colleges. Rightly so. But I’d ask you to stay with the Delius tonight.
What She Does with the Slow Movement
The second movement here — marked Lento e comodo — is about four and a half minutes long, and du Pré does something with the phrasing that I have never fully been able to explain. She holds back in places where any rational reading of the score would push forward, and then she moves through passages that seem to ask for breadth, and somehow the cumulative effect is not willfulness but inevitability. It sounds like a decision being made in real time. It sounds like memory.
She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1973 and gave her last public performance the same year, at thirty-one. By then this recording was already six years old, but it doesn’t feel like history — it feels like something still happening. That is the trick of the best live-studio recordings: they collapse time.
Malcolm Sargent died in October 1967, just months after these sessions. Du Pré’s own story continued for another twenty years, most of it spent unable to play. She died in 1987. The music she left behind is a small and specific body of work, and this is one of the stranger, quieter corners of it. Which is maybe why I keep coming back here, after the kid is in bed and the house is quiet enough to hear what’s actually going on.
Delius wrote a lot of music about transience — On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, A Song Before Sunrise, In a Summer Garden. He was obsessed with the moment just before something ends. He found the right cellist, even if he never knew it.