Few works in all of music begin as ominously as Elgar's Cello Concerto.
When the soloist's bow bites into those stark E minor chords, it's like a summons - and not to cocktails and a gossip. No, what we are being summoned to here is something far more grave and ominous. What we know of the work's genesis reinforces this sombre impression: Elgar began writing composing his concerto towards the end of the First World War, and he was bearing the scars of that time of conflict and loss.
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.
To pile misery on misery, Elgar accurately sensed that taste had turned against him - 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.
All this suggests that the composer was feeling pretty low. On the concerto's final page he even wrote ‘RIP’. No wonder that some cellists play the piece like a requiem. But is such morbidity valid? Much of the music is vitality itself. Elgar himself described it as ‘a real large work and, I think, good and alive’.
A haunting masterpiece
The concerto’s genesis was bound up with Elgar’s own declining health and the shifting musical climate of the 1910s. Once hailed as the voice of Edwardian confidence — the composer of Pomp and Circumstance marches, grand symphonies, and regal ceremonial music — Elgar found himself out of step with the fractured, modernist world that followed the war.
His wife Alice, his closest confidante and tireless champion, was gravely ill. In the summer of 1919, while convalescing after surgery, Elgar began sketching the concerto. Its melancholy lyricism and subdued orchestration stand in stark contrast to his earlier swaggering works, as though he had turned his gaze inward.
The premiere, however, was a disaster. Conducted by Elgar himself at the Queen’s Hall in October 1919, the performance was under-rehearsed, with too little time devoted to the concerto after preparations for other pieces on the program. Critics recognized flashes of genius but were underwhelmed; audiences largely overlooked it. For decades, the work remained on the margins of the cello repertoire, admired by specialists but rarely programmed.
Vulnerable yet dignified
Part of what makes the Cello Concerto so affecting is its unique balance of intimacy and drama. The opening, with its brusque chords and cello recitative, feels like a cry from the heart — direct, unadorned, almost improvisatory. The slow second movement has a wistful, autumnal glow, while the third movement Adagio is pure elegy: a long-breathed song that seems suspended in grief. The finale returns to agitation and struggle, yet collapses back into the sombre theme of the opening, as though the music cannot escape its own fate.
Unlike the showpiece concertos of Dvořák or Saint-Saëns, Elgar’s is never about virtuosity for its own sake. The cello here is a solitary voice, vulnerable yet dignified, set against an orchestra that murmurs and sighs rather than dazzles. It feels less like a public statement than a private confession overheard.
Today, the concerto stands as Elgar’s final masterpiece — an elegiac summation of a vanished Edwardian world, but also a timeless meditation on loss and resilience. Its haunting power lies in its honesty: a great composer stripped of pomp, writing from the heart, and leaving behind one of music’s most poignant farewells.
Elgar Cello Concerto: best recording
Jacqueline du Pré (cello); London Symphony Orchestra/Sir John Barbirolli
Warner Classics 6230752 (1965)
Seven years after John Barbirolli conducted André Navarra's version of this concerto in 1958, he found himself recording the Elgar again. This time the soloist was a British sensation, just turned 20.
Her name was Jacqueline du Pré. 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.
Elgar himself said that this concerto summed up ‘a man's attitude to life’, and I think this places an obligation on intepreters to dig deep into their own souls. Which is exactly what du Pré did, over and over again, when she performed this work. Perhaps in her later recordings she overdid the soulful angst: 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.
Five more great recordings of Elgar's Cello Concerto
1. Beatrice Harrison
New Symphony Orchestra/Edward Elgar (1928) | Naxos 8.111260
The question is, did Elgar really imagine the piece as unrelenting tragedy? One way to answer that is to dig out the 1928 recording that the composer conducted, with Beatrice Harrison as soloist. What you find comes as a bit of a shock. Elgar allows Harrison to pull the music around, but in the orchestral passages he surges on with amazing zest. Clearly, he didn't regard the piece as particularly doom-laden.
2. Yo-Yo Ma
London Symphony Orchestra/André Previn | Sony G010002679548T
Somewhere between du Pré's hyperactive romanticism and Steven Isserlis's monkish austerity [in his early first recording in 1988] is the American cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Lovingly accompanied by André Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra, Ma creates a stunning sonic landscape: misty, mellow, very Cotswoldsy. His timbre is like the delicate brush-strokes of a great watercolourist.
- We named the London Symphony Orchestra one of the best orchestras in the world
3. Julian Lloyd Webber
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Yehudi Menuhin (1986) | Philips 416 3542
Julian Lloyd Webber’s own recording of the concerto was deservedly acclaimed for its understated passion. This recording earned Lloyd Webber the prize for Best Classical Recording at the 1987 Brit Awards and many still consider it the best interpretation of Elgar's work, despite the plethora of recordings that have appeared since.
4. Truls Mørk
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Sir Simon Rattle (1999) | Erato 5453562
The mood is much darker on a recording made in 1999 by the Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk with Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Mørk turns the piece into an epic trudge through ominous terrain. And Rattle, a superbly responsive accompanist, enhances this sense of a figure battling against malevolent fate like some woebegone Thomas Hardy heroine, by bringing out the thickest, deepest sounds he can find in Elgar's orchestration.
5. Alisa Weilerstein
Staatskapelle Berlin/ Daniel Barenboim (2013) | Decca 478 2735
The exceptional disc that won Weilerstein the BBC Music Magazine Recording of the Year in 2014. 'Weilerstein avoids nostalgia and produces instead an account that is full of passion, grief and nobility of feeling,' said our review. 'Just the way she articulates the opening chords and brief recitative before the strings’ first entry has an authority and poetry that demands our attention from the outset, and the eloquence of her playing ensures that she holds it throughout.'
Words taken from Richard Morrison's article in the May 2004 issue of BBC Music Magazine, though this has since been added to and adapted.
Pics Getty Images
