There are recordings that make you forget you’re listening to a recording.
This is one of them.
The Session
Jacqueline du Pré was twenty-three years old when she walked into the Philharmonie in Berlin with her husband, Daniel Barenboim, conducting the orchestra that Karajan built. The year was 1968. She had maybe four years of full performing life left before multiple sclerosis began its theft of the most precise instrument she owned — her hands, her arms, her whole physical connection to the Stradivari cello she called “Davidov.”
She did not know any of that yet.
What she knew was this concerto. She had been playing it since she was sixteen, and by now it lived somewhere deeper than the fingers. EMI’s engineers captured it at the Philharmonie with the spacious acoustic that hall does when it’s given something worth reverberating — that specific Berlin bloom, not dry, not wet, just large and honest.
The engineering credit goes to Neville Boyling, working the desk for EMI’s Classics division, and he had the good sense to put du Pré exactly where she belongs: out front, present, never buried, but with the full weight of the Berlin Philharmonic behind her as an orchestra and not as wallpaper.
The Playing
Dvořák wrote this concerto near the end of his life, in America, homesick. You can hear it. The first movement carries that specific ache of someone imagining a place they can’t quite reach, and du Pré plays it like she already knows what longing costs.
Her tone in the slow movement — the Adagio ma non troppo — is nearly unbearable. Not theatrical. Just unbearably honest. The kind of playing that makes you put down whatever you were holding.
Barenboim keeps the Berliners close but not crowding. There’s a real conversation happening between the soloist and the orchestra, which is not always true even in great recordings of this concerto. Rostropovich owned this piece too, and his recordings with Karajan have a grandeur that’s genuinely different. But du Pré’s version is rawer, more exposed. She’s not performing nobility. She’s just telling you something.
The finale moves fast and doesn’t overstay. Dvořák originally ended the concerto differently — his first ending was conventional, symmetrical. He rewrote it after learning that Josefina Čermáková, a woman he had loved before her sister became his wife, was dying. He asked the orchestra to quote the song she had loved most. The concerto ends quietly because of that. Du Pré honors it.
The Record
The original EMI ASD pressing from 1968 is genuinely something to seek out if you find yourself in a shop with a good used bin. The later CD remasters are fine — the 2012 remaster on EMI Classics in particular cleaned up some of the tape noise without stripping the warmth.
But whatever format you hear this on, turn off the lights.
There’s a reason this recording has stayed in print for over fifty years. Not because of the backstory, though the backstory will wreck you if you let it. It stays in print because it is simply the most emotionally direct performance of this concerto committed to tape. It doesn’t argue with you. It doesn’t show off. It just opens, and if you’re in the right state of mind, you open with it.
Put the kid to bed first.