This book's subtitle ... "Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music" ... is as appalling as it is irresistible.
After all, classical music isn't usually equated with the excesses of the pop-rock-rap world. Classical music is known for decorum, not drugs; for civility more than sex.
BOOK REVIEW
"Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music"
Blair Tindall; Atlantic Monthly Press, 320 pages, $24
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Given such tawdry and tantalizing possibilities, we naturally want to find out more about the underside of an exalted profession. Blair Tindall gives us what we're looking for, even if the revelations are fairly tame and are mostly tied to her own life and the people she has known.
Sex and drugs are hardly the only topics tackled by the New Jersey-based writer and musician, a veteran of the New York music scene who went back to school when she was around 40 and received a master's degree in journalism from Stanford University. The book is part autobiography, part overview of the classical music industry and part cautionary tale, with an accent on the negative. In writing about the field that disappointed her, Tindall ... an oboist ... reflects a deep disenchantment and a profound ambivalence.
"Music had not become the glamorous and elite profession of Cold War-era fantasy, but an overpopulated, stagnant and low-paying business," she states. "Many of its inhabitants were highly intelligent and motivated, but ended up in careers which barely supported them and offered few opportunities for growth or creativity."
As a child, Tindall was happily free of such concerns. She discovered the oboe while attending a North Carolina elementary school and her talent propelled her to the North Carolina School of the Arts, a training ground for pre-college performers.
She was also precocious in other ways. At 14, she was drinking beer. At 16, she was having an affair with her 43-year-old teacher. Also in high school, she began selling "dime bags of pot" for $10 each. With her dope profits, she celebrated her graduation by buying tickets to a concert in which violinist Itzhak Perlman was accompanied by pianist Samuel Sanders.
Sanders ... a gifted musician who suffered from heart disease ... became Tindall's lover after she moved to New York, and she chronicles both his accomplishments and his sad decline.
Tindall also recounts her experiences with conductors Klaus Tennstedt and Leonard Bernstein, with whom she worked as a substitute player at the New York Philharmonic. Her humiliating rehearsal with Tennstedt ... in which she hit a horrendously wrong note in the slow movement of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony ... is so entertaining one wishes that the book had more of such vividly written anecdotes.
Tindall does, however, detail the various aspects of her life as a professional musician, including a tour of "The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber in Concert," which included a stop at Costa Mesa's Orange County Performing Arts Center (and a soaking in a hotel hot tub with the band). She also covers everything from her well-received New York recital debut to the unsuccessful orchestra auditions that contributed to her decision to combine writing with work as a part-time musician.
"When I do play music, it is a joy," she writes. "The reality of performing full-time wasn't the fantasy I'd imagined as a little girl."
Now, with an adult's perspective, Tindall trades the fantasy for a sometimes harsh reality.
Valerie Scher is the classical music critic for the Union-Tribune.
