Flute - Taschenbuch

At the outset of this informal autobiography, Adeney declares that as a teenager he identified three things that he most wanted from life. "First: That I would become the best flute player on the world. Second: To have a huge amount of sex. Third: To make some sense of this mysterious and confusing world." Coining from an artistic, semi-bohemian background, you might imagine that sex would not have been much of a problem, but until Adeney was in his late-40s, homosexual acts were illegal, and general attitudes took decades longer to relax. Much of Adeney's personal life has therefore been lived in the shadows, and he clearly relishes emerging into the light: "I've been a virtuoso chameleon for too long ... so now I'm trying in this book to describe what I'm really like". This book is also about what many other famous people were really like (at least in Adeney's eyes), from his often hard-bitten orchestral colleagues, to the great, and not so great, conductors with whom he worked. He claims disarmingly to be writing in the "minor key of old age", but he sounds a distinctly abrasive, major key of settling the score. Malcolm Sargent is his self-confessed bete noire - "he seemed to have little feeling for music and much for his public image" - and Sargent is the butt of various jokes throughout the book. But few conductors escape unscathed: Bruno Walter is dismissed as "dull", Celibidache as "ludicrous", and Riccardo Muti as "an arrogant, coarse bully", for example. Adeney does have some heroes, however, among them Thomas Beecham, Victor de Sabata, Serge Koussevitsky, and Benjamin Britten with whom he worked for many seasons at the Aldeburgh Festival.