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Few concertos<\/a><\/strong> begin as ominously as Elgar\u2019s for the cello<\/a><\/strong>. When the soloist\u2019s bow bites into those stark E minor chords, it\u2019s like a summons \u2013 and not to cocktails and a gossip. What we know of the work\u2019s genesis reinforces this sombre impression. Elgar<\/strong><\/a> began writing it towards the end of the First World War.<\/p>\n The Edwardian world, his world, had been blown apart. Many friends were dead. He had turned 60 and just undergone a throat operation. Alice, his stalwart wife, was ailing.<\/p>\n To pile misery on misery, Elgar accurately sensed that taste had turned against him \u2013 a suspicion cruelly confirmed when the grossly under-rehearsed premiere of this concerto was received with indifference in November 1919. He never completed another major work, though he lived for 15 more years.<\/p>\n All this suggests that the composer was feeling pretty low. On the concerto\u2019s final page he even wrote \u2018RIP\u2019. No wonder that some cellists play the piece like a requiem<\/a><\/strong>. But is such morbidity valid? Much of the music is vitality itself. Elgar himself described it as \u2018a real large work and, I think, good and alive\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Jacqueline du Pr\u00e9 (cello); London Symphony Orchestra\/Sir John Barbirolli<\/strong> Seven years after John Barbirolli conducted Andr\u00e9 Navarra\u2019s version of this concerto<\/a><\/strong> in 1958, he found himself recording the Elgar<\/a><\/strong> again. This time the soloist was a British sensation, just turned 20.<\/p>\n Her name was Jacqueline du Pr\u00e9<\/a><\/strong>. She opted for audaciously slow speeds and even more daring dynamics, often producing something between a whisper and a whimper, and intensifying the solo line with old-fashioned portamenti. Barbirolli must have been the first to realise that du Pr\u00e9\u2019s interpretation was unlike any other. It still is.<\/p>\n Elgar himself said that this concerto summed up \u2018a man\u2019s attitude to life\u2019, and I think this places an obligation on intepreters to dig deep into their own souls.\u00a0 Which is exactly what du Pr\u00e9 did, over and over again, when she performed this work. Perhaps in her later recordings (three live-concert versions; one for television) she overdid the soulful angst.<\/p>\n Her 1971 recording with Daniel Barenboim, for instance, seems almost a self-parody. But back in 1965, guided by the wise and humane Barbirolli, she achieved a much more satisfactory balance between head and heart. Hers is not a performance that I would want to live through every week. But it\u2019s the one recording of Elgar\u2019s Cello Concerto that I would not want to live without.<\/p>\n Here, we explain how Elgar\u2019s Cello Concerto made Jacqueline du Pr\u00e9 quite so famous<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\nWhat is the best recording of Elgar\u2019s Cello Concerto?<\/h2>\n