Word: cello
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...instant she looked like a puckish milkmaid, the next like Ophelia going mad. The music was Schumann's cello concerto, a rapturous, heart-on-the-sleeve piece that was clearly intended to sear, not soothe, the savage breast. The cellist was Britain's Jacqueline Du Pré, who performed last week in Manhattan with Leonard Bernstein's New York Philharmonic. It was a performance to be seen as much as heard, for Du Pré couldn't sit still a minute...
Swathed in acres of floor-length red chiffon, she attacked her cello in ungainly frenzy, reaching forward to take a massive chop with her bow, arching her back, tossing her head, closing in on the cello again and again...
...Enough. Seldom have women tackled the cello with such power. In this century, Suggia (1888-1950) was one of the few women with sufficient strength to compete on equal terms with men. Jacqueline Du Pré is big enough, both musically and physically (5 ft. 9 in., 150 Ibs.), perhaps because she literally grew up with a cello. The daughter of an English business executive, she was four years old when she heard the instrument played on a BBC broadcast in London. "All I remember," she says, "is that it had a nice sound. So I asked Mother...
...mother, a concert pianist under her maiden name, Iris Greep, went out and bought the first one she saw, a three-quarter length box that served until Jacqueline was six and began taking lessons at the London Cello School. She progressed so brilliantly that at the age of eleven she won the Suggia International Cello Award. After seven years of tutoring under London Cellist William Pleeth, she worked for five months in Moscow with Mstislav Rostropovich...
...also extraordinary that though she plays with all the maturity and confidence of her instruments, Jacqueline suffers none of the neuroses of a former prodigy. Her temperament is as direct and gay as her cello is brooding and introspective. She lives in a London flat and loves the city's mod fashions, but unfortunately, she says, "I couldn't wear a miniskirt and play the cello...