Apart from his childhood which still gave him nightmares, Rannaldini had two great sadnesses. He was one of the greatest conductors in the world, but he minded that he was only an interpretative artist. He had composed in his youth, but, able to absorb other people’s music so effortlessly, he was terrified of being derivative and banal, and not succeeding 100 per cent. Secondly, he would have given anything to be six foot rather than five foot six.
And now he was back, padding stealthily into the new Mozart Hall a day early. The orchestra had already played Mahler’s Fourth to a rapturous reception in Vienna the night before. Afterwards most of the musicians had stayed up for Oswaldo’s birthday party, preferring to catch an early morning plane home for the rehearsal while still tight.
With the cheers of the sophisticated Viennese audience still ringing in their aching heads, they felt there was little need to do more than touch up a few difficult passages and practise with Hermione, who was to be the soloist in the fourth movement on Sunday. As Rannaldini was due back tomorrow, there was very much an elegiac feeling of the last day of the holidays, which was intensified by the players’ paraphernalia of music cases, dinner-jackets, evening dresses in plastic cases and holdalls which littered the front-stall seats and the gangway. No-one even minded that a cleaner was hoovering the red carpet up in the dress circle.
Hands floating above the music like a seagull, tall and gangling with a shock of blond hair, Oswaldo swayed on the rostrum, his ginger T-shirt showing two inches of bony white back each time he raised his arms.
‘This is dancing music,’ he said, calling a halt in the second movement. ‘It should be a little yar.’
Short of English, he pushed his elbows upwards, swaying his narrow hips to illustrate an imaginary beat.
‘Christ, I’ve got a hangover,’ said the leader of the orchestra, calling out to a passing Bob Harefield, ‘Get us an Alka-Seltzer, there’s a love, and let’s have a black-coffee break at the end of this movement, Ossie.’
But suddenly the musicians at the front desks started to shake, without knowing why. Then, gradually, as a faint sweet-musky scent reached the nostrils of the entire orchestra, they realized it was Rannaldini’s horribly distinctive aftershave, Maestro, specially created for him by Givenchy, wafting over them, as he strolled towards the rostrum.
‘A little yar,’ he murmured silkily. ‘What a very specific instruction. Not very OK ya in this case.’
The leader of the orchestra dropped his bow, the percussionist choked on his toffee, a bassoonist hastily put down P.D. James, the harpist stopped painting her toenails, a beautiful violinist in a purple shirt, deliberately placed at the desk nearest the audience, stopped reading a letter from her boyfriend. A female horn player, who’d been infatuated with Rannaldini since he’d bedded her on the orchestra’s last trip to Japan, dived behind the cellist in front, frantically combing her hair, and applying blusher to her blanched cheeks. A paper dart intended for Oswaldo fell at Rannaldini’s feet. Oswaldo melted away like snow in the morning sun. Bob Harefield on his way into the hall with a fizzing glass of Alka-Seltzer went sharply into reverse.
Normally chatter swelled whenever there was a halt, but now the hall was totally silent. Musicians, still trickling in because they hadn’t expected Rannaldini, were greeted with a sabatier tongue which slashed through their excuses.
‘Another pile-up on the motorway? The traffic was terrible from the airport?’ bawled Rannaldini to a little flautist weighed down by Sainsbury carrier bags. ‘The road was perfectly clear ten minutes ago.
‘A train taken off? Balderdash!’ His voice rose to a scream. ‘You’re late! If it happens again you’re fired.’
‘I’m sorry, Rannaldini, there was a bomb-scare in Sloane Square,’ said a front-desk violinist scuttling in.
‘Bomb-scare,’ purred Rannaldini, as the man frantically tuned his violin, twiddling and twisting the nobs with a shaking hand. Then with a roar, ‘I’ll put a bomb under you, all of you! Just look under your cars before you leave.’
Slowly he mounted the rostrum. As gleamingly brown from the LA sun as any of the cellos in his string section, he kept on his black overcoat with the astrakhan collar because he hadn’t adjusted to the cold March weather. Letting the score drop to the floor in a gesture of contempt, he removed his Rolex and laid it on the music-stand, then stood as still as one of his own Valhalla statues, establishing dominance.
The orchestra edged nearer their music-stands, wishing they could have fastened seat-belts against turbulence. Suddenly the music they’d known backwards five minutes ago seemed terrifyingly unfamiliar.
Tapping the baton given him by Toscanini, Rannaldini held out his arms. The leader put his violin under his chin, bow quaking in his hand, as Rannaldini gave the upbeat for the start of the funereally slow third movement.
Eyes missing nothing, gesticulating exquisitely with his beautiful hands, the right one keeping time, the left exhorting his musicians on, he let them have their heads. Economical with his movements, even his stick hand twitching no more than the tail of a cat watching a bird through a window, Rannaldini lulled them into a false sense of security. Perhaps the audience in Vienna had been right, after all.
Then he unleashed his fury, like a Fascist police squad moving in on a defenceless mob with cudgels, finding fault after fault with the performance until the women were in tears, the men grey and shaking, and shredded India rubber covered the floor where they’d erased Oswaldo’s instructions on their scores and replaced them with Rannaldini’s.
Able to identify a wrong note ten miles away, he singled out an oboe player. ‘You make a hundred meestakes.’
‘It’s difficult that bit,’ stammered the player.
‘Rubbish,’ thundered Rannaldini.
Strolling down from the rostrum he picked up the oboe and played it perfectly.
‘You haven’t practised. You’re fired.’ He handed back the oboe.
Then he noticed Bob Harefield’s charming Humpty Dumpty face with its tired bruised eyes, and shouted that he would not conduct on Sunday unless the twenty-four musicians Bob had hired in his absence were fired as well.
‘I no Okkay them,’ he screamed.
‘But every seat is sold, Maestro, and what about the BBC and Catchitune?’ said the manager of the Mozart Hall, almost in tears.
‘It weel ’ave to be cancelled,’ snarled Rannaldini. ‘I weel not play with peegs.’ Howling, he turned on his orchestra and would have kicked over a few music-stands if his handmade black shoes hadn’t been new.
‘I ’ear you murder Beethoven Nine. Poor Beethoven I ’ope they didn’t restore his ’earing in ’eaven. I ’ave tape of Radio Three programme last week when you abort The Creation.’
‘We got very good reviews for both,’ protested Bob, putting a comforting arm round the shoulder of the sacked oboist.
‘Reviewers are stupid peegs, and I want heem sacked,’ Rannaldini pointed at the front-desk violinist who’d rushed in late.
‘We can’t sack him,’ whispered Bob. ‘His wife’s just left him.’
‘Sensible woman,’ said Rannaldini, then, his voice rising to a shriek, ‘I want heem fired.’
A diversion was caused by the cleaner who started hoovering again at the back of the stalls.
‘Another sensible woman,’ said Rannaldini, ‘trying to obliterate this cacophony.’
A further diversion was caused by the arrival of Hermione swathed in mink to sing in the fourth movement.
‘I refuse to put those poor furriers out of business,’ she was saying to her entourage of agent, secretary, make-up girl, seamstress and lighting specialist. ‘I, for one, believe people come before animals.’