CCMusic.com

'She clearly was born to play the cello,' wrote theNew York Timesof Jacqueline du Pré in 1967. Just five years later her career was cut tragically short by illness. Providing a treasurable memento of her art, this is a newly-assembled 5 LP collection of masterworks for cello and orchestra from three centuries. It includes the Elgar Concerto, so closely associated with du Pré, and a 1968 recording of Strauss'sDon Quixotewhich, after a complex genesis, was not released until 1995, the height of the CD era. Now, it makes it's first appearance on LP. In each work, the cellist provides evidence of what her teacher, William Pleeth, described as the 'perfect balance of youth and maturity.' Jacqueline du Pré, performing with the two conductors most closely associated with her career, brings characteristic exuberance, passion and colour to three cello concertos rooted in the 18th century. In his memoir A Life In Music, Daniel Barenboim wrote: "I have never encountered anyone for whom music was such a natural form of expression as it was for Jacqueline... She had a capacity to imagine sound such as I never met in any other musician."