There are recordings that document a performance, and then there are recordings that documents a person — and this is one of the second kind.
Jacqueline du Pré was twenty years old when she walked into Kingsway Hall in London in August 1965. She had been playing the Elgar concerto in concert for about a year, and something had already happened between her and this music that couldn’t be explained by training or technique. Sir John Barbirolli conducted the London Symphony Orchestra. He was sixty-five years old and had known Elgar personally. That combination — a young woman on fire and an old man who remembered — is audible in every bar.
The Recording
Kingsway Hall was a Nonconformist chapel in Holborn that EMI used for decades precisely because of its acoustics: a warmth in the low-mid range, a natural bloom around the strings, a sense of actual physical space without muddiness. Producer Ronald Kinloch Anderson and engineer Peter Andry understood how to place du Pré in that room — her cello sits forward of the orchestra but not artificially so, like a voice speaking in front of a crowd rather than shouting over one.
The LSO players that week were not going through the motions. You can hear it in the second movement scherzo, where the orchestra keeps its edge while du Pré bounces above them with something that sounds genuinely reckless for 1965. Barbirolli reportedly wept during one of the takes. He was not a man given to understatement, but neither was he wrong.
The Concerto Itself
Elgar wrote this in 1919, just after the war, when he had watched the world he understood collapse completely. It is not a triumphant concerto. The famous opening cello gesture — that wide, arching phrase in the first bars — sounds less like a statement than a question, and one already resigned to a difficult answer.
What du Pré understood, at twenty, was grief. Not the performance of grief, but its actual texture: the way it moves between numbness and sudden ferocity. The slow movement here — the Adagio — is almost unbearably private. She plays it at a tempo that makes you hold your breath, not because it drags but because it feels like something that might end too soon.
There were other recordings before this one. Du Pré had listened to Jacqueline Fournier, to Tortelier. She put them aside. The version she arrived at belongs to nobody else.
Her career lasted less than a decade after this session. Multiple sclerosis began affecting her playing in 1971, and she gave her last public performance in 1973. She died in 1987, at forty-two. Daniel Barenboim, who married her in 1967, conducted many of her later concerts, and their relationship to this music — their shared ownership of it — became one of the more complicated stories in twentieth-century classical performance.
This recording came out in early 1966 and was not initially the commercial sensation it later became. It took years, and tragedy, for the world to hear it properly.
Put it on in a quiet room. The Adagio at low volume, when it’s late. You’ll find it.