One Time at Band Camp

Blair Tindall.
Flutes are for wusses.

Those crazy, hedonistic oboists:

A PROFESSIONAL oboist has lifted the curtain on sex, drugs and nepotism in the world of classical music.

Blair Tindall, who played with the New York Philharmonic, offers an unseemly tour behind the scenes in a book entitled Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music.

Tindall claims that sex played a decisive role in her musical career. She says she was simultaneously involved with three leading New York oboists — two married — who gave her work in their orchestras. One had a maxim: “The section that lays together plays together.”

She describes leaping naked into a hotel pool with a leading member of a touring Andrew Lloyd Webber production who subsequently made love to her in his hotel suite as “exuberantly” as he performed music...

Now in her mid-forties, she says she dated “almost every classical musician around my age” — as well as some who were not, including two of her high-school music teachers.

“Instrument players had a sexual style unique to their instrument,” she writes. “Neurotic violinists, anonymous in their orchestra section, came fast. Trumpet players pumped away like jocks, while pianists’ sensitive fingers worked magic. French horn players, their instruments the testiest of all, could rarely get it up, but percussionists could make beautiful music out of anything.”

- From The Truth of Making Sweet Music, by James Bone, in Saturday's TimesOnline.

I wonder what she thought of the tromboner.

But what sort of lover might Ms. Tindall be? A quick internet search gives us a hint. According to the Winter 1992 Double Reed, NYT critic Allan Kozinn called her February 24, 1991 solo debut recital in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall "a clever, stylistically varied program...her sound was as sweet as an oboe timbre can be. She played a Telemann Sonata in c minor, and applied ornamentation that was adventurous, sometimes unconventional, and consistently rich in character. Ms. Tindall was joined by members of the Colorado String Quartet for a beautifully balanced, carefully shaped account of the Mozart Oboe Quartet."