Amazon continues its quest to corner the content market, most recently in the guise of Amazon Studios. Now fully engaged in not just curating, but also producing streaming video for Amazon Prime members, the media giant is serving up a small but diverse and growing selection of original programming. One of the most compelling to date, for my money, is Mozart in the Jungle.
With season one available in its entirety, and follow-on seasons being whispered about, the show has been rightly celebrated for its comedic, sympathetic, yet entirely approachable depiction of the contemporary classical music scene. The inaugural season tracks a few weeks’ worth of developments in the lives of
musicians and personalities associated with the New York Symphony Orchestra, as both a red-hot, controversial conductor, and a relatively obscure young oboist, simultaneously take on new and challenging 
roles. If that sounds a little dry, then take heart in knowing that all throughout, the show more than lives up to the source-book’s subtitle: Sex, drugs, and classical music.
That book, which lends the title and is nodded at with a “based on” credit, is every bit as good, but really couldn’t be much more different than the show. It’s a 2006 memoir penned by abundantly gifted journalist/musician Blair Tindall, chronicling her desperate decades in transition from being a conservatory ingenue to a rather jaded working musician. Where the series takes
place in the present day, and only hints at the challenges faced by orchestras in staying culturally relevant, Tindall’s book spans the seventies, eighties and nineties, and is liberally peppered with not just personal anecdotes, but also first-class reporting—facts and figures—supporting a dire thesis warning us that classical music, presented as a municipal non-profit, might be a losing proposition. Spend a bit of time googling the number of orchestras, operas, ballet companies, and chamber groups failing or in bankruptcy, and you’ll get the queasy feeling Tindall knows whereof she speaks.
Depressing as that might be, I very much enjoyed her book, and I recommend it as heartily as I recommend the new Amazon series. For a lover of classical music, or even a casual enjoyer of the same, the book and the series offer two divergent, not-quite-conflicting, inside views of an otherwise cloistered world. One is exuberant and clamorous, the other intimate and melancholy; you get the feeling that between the two, a more or less synoptic view emerges. And, if nothing else, between the two there’s certainly no shortage of sex, drugs, and classical music.
