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.

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. He then lit a postcoital cigarette and offered her a job on Lloyd Webber’s new Aspects of Love in New York. “Why, I thought, did I bother with an answering machine?” Tindall writes. “Between XXX and my former oboist boyfriends, I got hired for most of my gigs in bed.”

Although Tindall’s 25-year music career included such highlights as working with Leonard Bernstein, she also had to make money recording Karaoke music, and got so bored on Broadway that she would read magazines on her music stand while playing in the orchestra pit.

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.”

One man not granted anonymity in the book is the Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart. Tindall claims that she had sex with him and that he invited her to Salt Lake City, where he was music director of the Utah Symphony. “The night before my departure he called to cancel because his wife was suddenly visiting him to get pregnant,” she says.

Mr Lockhart has issued a statement insisting that the relationship was “at no time anything more than friendship”.

Disenchanted with the classical music world, Tindall went to Stanford University to study journalism and has written for The New York Times.

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