Jacqueline du Pré plays Mendelssohn, Granados and Saint-Saëns

On 1 March 1961, Jacqueline du Pré performed at Wigmore Hall  for the first time when she was only sixteen years old. The concert marked the start of a dazzling career, brilliant yet brief, making her one of the most emblematic cellists of the twentieth century. Throughout her career, she collaborated with renowned soloists and friends: Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta, Pinchas Zukerman, and conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim, whom she married in 1967. She was finally forced to give up her career when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis eleven years later, a disease that took her life prematurely on 19 October 1987, at the age of forty-two.

Discover this magnificent archive, recorded a year after her debut. Accompanied on the piano by her mother, she performs Mendelssohn’s Song without words, Op. 109, the only one Mendelssohn did not compose solely for the piano, an arrangement of the ‘Intermezzo’ from Granados’s opera Goeyscas, and Saint-Saëns’s Allegro Appassionato, a masterpiece of the cello repertoire. To conclude this phenomenal program, Mstislav Rostropovich, who was one of her mentors, performs Beethoven’s 12 Variations on “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen”, the famous aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute.