by Jilly Cooper
In his late teens he left Italy and sought out his father, now a rich Hamburg industrialist who, proud of his unexpectedly glamorous, talented son, gave him some money and introduced him to a rich but plain wife, who supported him through three years at music school and gave him a son, little Wolfgang.
Just after leaving college, Rannaldini had another break, conducting his first performance of Medea, during which he fell madly in love with Cecilia, a famous but incredibly temperamental visiting soprano who was playing the leading role. He married her as soon as he could get a divorce. Cecilia bore him several children, of whom Natasha was the eldest, and helped him hugely with his career.
A musician of genius, who could play several instruments, including the eternal triangle, Rannaldini had been persuaded by Cecilia that he would only have the ultimate control he craved if he became a conductor. Their stormy marriage lasted fifteen years, and only foundered when Rannaldini’s affaire with Hermione became too public and Cecilia’s jealousy too excessive. Leaving her because she was too much trouble, he married Kitty because she was absolutely no trouble at all.
An improviser of genius, Rannaldini expected his musicians to be note-perfect at a first rehearsal. He was lucky in that he had a memory instant as a Polaroid. Glanced at, a page of music was not forgotten. Thus he was always able to conduct without a score, which was good because he never lost vital eye-contact with his orchestra, and because he was too vain to wear spectacles in public.
Rannaldini was a dandy. His tailcoats were only perfect after twenty-five fittings. Women had been known to die for Rannaldini’s back with its broad flat shoulders beneath the polished pelt of pewter-grey hair. The front was even better, with the sculptured, usually tanned, features, the beautifully shaped, slightly thin lips, and the dark, dark eyes that not only mesmerized orchestras, but gazed deep, deep into women’s eyes until their eyeballs melted.
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 music
ians 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.’
Having kissed her on both cheeks, Rannaldini calmed down a little.
‘We will move on to the last movement, since Mrs Harefield has done you the honour of turning up and, unlike you, knows the score.’
Hermione was a nightmare to work with. Beneath the façade of gushing serenity, she was ruthlessly egotistical, always making a fuss about dressing rooms and acoustics, taking against members of the orchestra, or other soloists, creating fearful anxiety as to whether she would go on at all, leaving everyone drained because she’d milked them of so many compliments. Then, once she opened her mouth, her performance would be flawless.
Today as she flapped around, fussing about being properly lit, her husband Bob went quietly round the orchestra smoothing feathers. Holding the score, eating an apple to moisten her throat, Hermione listened unmoved while Rannaldini bawled out a beautiful little blond female flautist who, out of terror, had fluffed the introductory bars before Hermione’s entrance.
Waiting for the nod to bring her in, Hermione stood on Rannaldini’s left, as she had so often in the past while he was making her famous in every capital in the world. It still gave Rannaldini a charge. Hermione couldn’t act for the percussionist’s toffee. She always sacrificed acting for beauty of tone. She irritated the hell out of Rannaldini, but when she opened her mouth and that ripple of angelic sound soared full and clear above the orchestra, he could forgive her anything. In return she seemed to be making love to him with her huge brown eyes, grateful to him for conjuring up magic she was unaware she possessed.
The orchestra watched her wonderful bosom rising and falling with a mixture of lust and dislike, but at the end they gave her a round of applause and even the odd bravo because she expected it.
‘Excellent, Mrs Harefield.’ Rannaldini’s flat bitchy voice could sink to reverberatingly seductive depths when he was in a conciliatory mood.
‘But as for you lot, go ’ome and practise. This is the score.’ Picking it off the floor, he hurled it into the orchestra, narrowly missing a lady clarinetist. ‘Now steek to eet, and eef you ’aven’t learn it properly by tomorrow, I won’t go on on Sunday.’ And he stalked out, leaving Hermione, who was expecting lunch at San Lorenzo, mouthing in outrage.
‘What can we do?’ asked the manager of the Mozart Hall in despair. ‘You can’t sack all those musicians.’
Bob shrugged. ‘Rannaldini’s just jackbooting around because he’s been away and he can’t bear his orchestra playing well for someone else. Also,’ Bob dropped his voice, ‘Cecilia – wife number two – is in London. She’s come over for Lucia at Covent Garden, so he wanted an excuse to storm out early and take her to lunch and double bed at The Savoy. She lives in New York, but he always sleeps with her when she comes over, or if he’s in New York.’
‘What’s she like?’ asked the leader of the orchestra, forgetting his hangover.
‘Little black mamba in little black numbers. Eats men for breakfast, or would if she wasn’t always on a diet.’ Bob shook with laughter.
‘Goodness,’ said the sacked oboe player, momentarily roused out of his despondency, ‘Does Hermione know?’
‘Christ, no! Why upset her? Cecilia’s supposed to be going down to Bagley Hall this evening to some end-of-term concert. Boris Levitsky’s the music master so the standard may have improved a little. I suppose Rannaldini may roll up as well, and Hermione. They’ll all fly in different helicopters.’
‘That guy’s a saint,’ said the leader of the orchestra, as Bob moved off to calm Hermione down.
17
Bagley Hall was a chic progressive boarding-school set amid rolling green parkland on the edge of the Rutminster-Gloucestershire border. The parents, who tended to be arty or from the media, had chosen the school mostly because they heard the music was wonderful, and they believed that their somewhat problematical darlings wouldn’t come to much harm amid such remote rural surroundings. The former assumption was certainly true since Boris Levitsky had become music master. Last seen threatening to beat up Lysander for comforting his wife Rachel after they met in a London chemist’s, Boris had shortly afterwards left the London Met, where he had worked as an assistant conductor, in an attempt to save his marriage.
Boris had loathed being an assistant conductor, which meant he was a glorified understudy, who took rehearsals, memorized scores and kept a tailcoat hanging in a cupboard backstage, ready to come on at a moment’s notice – but alas the moment never came.
This, with the added frustration of never getting any of his compositions published or performed, had driven Boris into the ego boost of an affaire with Chloe the mezzo.
Envious of Boris’s genius both as composer and conductor and not wanting competition at the London Met, Rannaldini had actively helped him to get the job at Bagley Hall, not least because he felt his daughter Natasha, and less so his son Wolfgang, who was in his last year and musically disinclined, could do with some decent teaching.
Boris found teaching much worse than being an assistant conductor. It was so draining that he had no effort left for composition. He was thirty-one and he was aware of time running out, particularly now that Europe, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, was flooded with Russian musicians. His novelty value was ebbing away. He would never achieve recognition.
Now the concert hall was filling up. Through the thick green velvet curtains, Boris could see Kitty Rannaldini, so sweet and downtrodden being ignored by her stepdaughter, Natasha. A voluptuous sixteen year old, almost incestuously in love with her father, Natasha had inherited both Cecilia’s and Rannaldini’s histrionic temperaments but not alas their talent. Her voice was powerful, but harsh. Assuming it must be good, however, she never listened to criticism.
Boris’s best pupil was Marcus Campbell-Black, who at seventeen played the piano with such sensitivity and imagination that there was little left to teach him. Through the curtain, Boris could see Marcus’s father, the legendarily handsome Rupert. Only dragged here on sufferance by his wife Taggie, Rupert was determined to leave early. He didn’t want to be buttonholed by his ex-wife Helen, who was sitting in the row behind.
Rupert had not forgiven Helen for not sending Marcus to his old school, Harrow. Convinced that there was no money in playing the piano as a career, it had taken Rupert a long time to get over the shock, four years ago, when Marcus had timidly announced that he wanted to become a concert pianist.
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br /> Today Rupert was worrying about the recession. At Venturer, the local ITV company of which he was a director, advertising had slumped. The bloodstock market had also taken ä dive. Finally he had been up all night with a sick filly, who was a distinct possibility for the Guineas and The Oaks and he wanted to get back to her.
He was, therefore, the only adult not thrown into turmoil because Rannaldini had just telephoned Natasha to say he would be attending the concert after all. Parents and teachers were all in a tizz in case one of their darlings was discovered. The pupils, on the other hand, were more excited by the presence of Georgie Maguire and Guy Seymour who were becoming cult figures since the launching of Rock Star. Natasha Rannaldini, who saw herself as the victim of a broken home, thought ‘Rock Star’ was the most wonderful song, and that the reason she wasn’t as popular at Bagley Hall as Flora Seymour was because she didn’t have parents as happy as Guy and Georgie. Amazed to see them arriving with her dreary stepmother, whom she usually passed off as the younger children’s au pair, Natasha was forced to speak to Kitty in order to meet them.
‘Shame your father isn’t here to hear you singing,’ said Guy.
‘But he will be.’ From under heavy eyelids, Natasha shot a spiteful glance at Kitty. ‘He just rang to say he’s on his way.’
For a second, Guy thought Kitty would black out with horror as she remembered she hadn’t turned on the central heating in the tower, or put clean sheets on Rannaldini’s bed there or in her bedroom, in case he deigned to sleep with her this evening. There was nothing special for supper, and Rannaldini’s guard-dogs were still down in the village with their handler. He liked a pack welcome.
‘I must go,’ she mumbled white-lipped, ‘I’ll get a taxi.’
‘You will not.’ Firmly Guy took her arm. ‘It’s Rannaldini’s fault for arriving a day early. He can join us at The Heavenly Host.’