Appassionata - Jilly Cooper (Rutshire Chronicles #5)

They called her L'Appassionata, although her real name was Abigail Rosen. She was the sexiest, most flamboyant violinist on the classical music scene, adored by her fans and lusted after by every man who heard her play.

She was also the loneliest, most exploited girl in the world, and when a dramatic suicide attempt destroyed her career as a fiddle player, she set her sights on the male-dominated heights of the conductor's rostrum.

Taking a conducting course in London, Abby finds friends for the first time in her life: Flora Seymour, a brilliant young viola player, who has never recovered from a schoolgirl affaire with the sexually destructive, international maestro, Rannaldini; and Marcus Campbell-Black, desperately trying to overcome both asthma and the contempt of his famous father, Rupert, and make it as a concert pianist.

When Abby gets the chance to take over the Rutminster Symphony Orchestra, the three friends set up house together. Abby is ecstatic, not realizing the RSO is in hock up to its neck and is composed of the wildest bunch of musicians ever to blow a horn or caress a fiddle.

Abby finds it increasingly difficult to control her undisciplined rabble and pretend she is not madly attracted to the fatally glamorous horn player, Viking O'Neill who claims droit de seigneur over every pretty woman joining the orchestra.

Matters aren't helped when the new managing director of the RSO proves to be a rough, rugged Yorkshireman, determined to knock Abby and the orchestra into shape in his own way. And then Rannaldini rolls up with the Machiavellian plans of his own to sabotage the RSO.

Effervescent as champagne, Jilly Cooper's new novel not only provides a fascinating and hilariously funny insight into the lives and loves of a provincial orchestra, but also takes the reader on a thrilling journey from Bogotá through Buenos Aires, New York and Lake Lucerne, to Prague, ending up with a rampageous orchestral tour of Spain and the high drama of an international piano competition.