When Rannaldini had joined the London Met eight years ago, he had rowed constantly with the Board. Apart from being away so much, he cost them a fortune in overtime, because he was always late, and then would make the orchestra spend three hours getting three bars right. But, because he had been so successful, he now had them eating out of his very grasping hand and could do what he liked.

For Rannaldini sold records. The London Met loathed him, but he bullied them into perfection. They were the best and most famous orchestra in Europe, and they never had an empty seat.

They were also the best looking. Resplendent himself, Rannaldini liked beauty in others, and knew that audiences liked gazing at beautiful people, particularly when the music became too demanding. Bob Harefield, therefore, scoured the country for attractive young musicians, who played more vigorously, were more malleable and much cheaper. In the London Met, unless you were exceptionally gifted, over forty you were a marked man.

Biographers tended to attribute Rannaldini’s machiavellian nature to his early life. His father, Wolfgang, had been a German army officer, who met Rannaldini’s mother Gina, a chilly left-wing intellectual of great beauty but uncertain temper, during the last despairing days of the war, when the Germans had withdrawn up the leg of Italy.

Returning to Italy after a gruelling three years in a POW camp, Wolfgang found Gina living on the edge of a small Umbrian hill town, unhappily and most unsuitably married to Paolo Rannaldini, an Italian gentleman farmer, who’d lost practically everything in the war. Although Gina had grown less beautiful and more cantankerous, the affaire started again, until Paolo found out, by which time Wolfgang was quite relieved to be seen off with a shotgun. Having failed to withdraw down the leg of Gina, however, the result was a baby called Roberto, who took Paolo’s name but little else.

After this reversal, Paolo increasingly sought refuge in drink and other women and occasionally to beating up little Roberto. Gina, blaming her son quite wrongly for sabotaging the political career which she had always dreamed of, was terribly hard on him, frequently hitting him for displaying the same sybaritic nature as his German father. Even worse, she gave him no affection, particularly humiliating in a country where mothers hero-worship their sons, and took no pride in his achievements.

Irresistible to women, Roberto grew up fatally drawn to those who rejected him, or gave him a hard time like his mother. In return for his savage upbringing, he dealt out savage treatment to his musicians, his staff, and any woman foolish enough to fall in love with him.

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.