SEVENTEEN years after her death, and 31 after the onset of multiple sclerosis stopped her from performing, the aura of Jacqueline du Pré glows on — undimmed by time or scandalmongers. That, at least, was the impression given in Birmingham on Wednesday, when thousands gathered for an eight-hour celebration of the cellist, taking in talks, films and concerts, on what would have been her 60th birthday. Appropriately, all the proceeds (with the soloists donating their services) went to the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call this veneration of du Pré a cult. It’s too English for that. But when Julian Lloyd Webber, in the course of introducing his slightly unctuous cello piece, Jackie’s Song, denounced “that horrible, sleazy film” (meaning Hilary and Jackie, the 1998 movie based on the poisonous biography of du Pré written by her sister and brother), he drew quiet but fervent murmurs of approval around the hall.

In that reverential atmosphere, and with the stage dominated by huge projections of the golden-haired, schoolgirly du Pré radiant in her all-too-brief prime, you felt concern for the cellists required somehow to evoke the exhilarating passion of her playing. Especially in repertoire on which she left an indelible stamp in the collective musical memory.

But there was no need for worry about comparisons when Raphael Wallfisch (the driving force behind the whole event) took on the quintessential du Pré piece, Elgar’s Cello Concerto, in the evening concert with the English Symphony Orchestra conducted by William Boughton. Though eloquent and sometimes touching, his secure and steady reading was poles apart, in emotional terms, from the five-act tragedy that du Pré made of this autumnal work. And much the same was true of Lloyd Webber’s elegant and supple Rachmaninov and Debussy sonatas with the pianist John Lenehan.

The day’s only true disappointment was a routine and occasionally untidy performance of Beethoven’s Ghost Trio by three young performers capable of much more: the violinist David Fruehwirth, the cellist Jamie Walton and the pianist Daniel Grimwood. But perhaps they were ill-served by the programming, for we had just been shown a film of this piece performed, with ethereal intensity, by du Pré, Zukerman and Barenboim.

Appropriately, in a tribute to a performer whose career was over at 28, youth played a part. What seemed like every teenage cellist in Birmingham — about 80 in all — gathered under John Todd’s direction to perform a short programme that included a new Meditation by Edward Watson (lugubrious but sincere) and Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, with Wallfisch again the soloist.

But overshadowing all else, inevitably, were Christopher Nupen’s priceless films of du Pré in action. Such vitality, such musical intuition — so generously given and so cruelly silenced. And such a capacity to speak, via her cello, from the soul to the soul. One can understand the enduring adulation — even if, encountered en masse for eight hours, it’s all a bit gooey.