Cello Concerto, Enigma Variations: Du Pre Barenboim / Philadelphia O Lpo

This is a DSD (Direct Stream Digital) recording
Forget the movie, forget the book that inspired the movie, you can see it all on daytime TV. Not that any of it is invalid or untrue, but if you want to know at least one true thing about Jacqueline Du Pre, listen to this disc and remember that, for an all too brief time, she was a unique artist, a musician who communicated a sense of fantasy so strong and free that it seemed she was flying, almost improvising the music she played.
Du Pre covered the usual virtuoso repertoire, but her signature piece, the one she absolutely owned, was the moody, elegiac Cello Concerto of Edward Elgar, of which she had already made a classic studio recording when this live performance was taped in 1970. Here once again she possesses the music, not just by sheer intensity, but with a musical imagination that turns details and passagework into a narrative that really seems to go somewhere, as if she has appropriated the composer's voice. Supplemented by Daniel Barenboim's nicely turned 'Enigma Variations,' this disc is well worth having for love of Edward or Jackie.