A UNIQUE PORTRAIT OF AMAJOR INTERNATIONAL ORCHESTRA A successful professional orchestra is a world of its own, a workplace in which fewer than a hundred people spend all their waking hours together – and on tour their sleeping ones too – often in conditions of extreme creative stress. At its best, the orchestra is an image of harmony and selfless co-operation. It is also, inevitably, full of tensions, enthusiasms, arguments, scandals, affection and rivalry. Through candid and intimate interviews with members of the London Philharmonic, Danny Danziger exposes the pressure and passions of performing life, what it means to be bound up with music day after day, and takes us inside the intense and fascinating world of the professional musician as no one has done before. "I read this book at one sitting…excellent"JEFFREY BERNARD, 'The Oldie' "A real eye-opener"GRAEME KAY, 'Opera Now' "Oral history at its most quintessential"TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT "One is struck by the exhilarating dichotomy between the most ethereal of the arts and its earthy practitioners"MICHAEL HOYLE, 'Financial Times'