Oboist Blair Tindall’s memoir Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music ruffled feathers when it was published in 2005, with its candid look at the on and offstage lives of New York’s elite musicians. A little under 20 years later, the book was made into a hit television series by Amazon Prime, this time as a comedy telling the story of a young musician, Hayley (played by Lola Kirke), breaking into the scene in New York. The show ran for four seasons and picked up a swathe of awards.

The book and television series have now inspired Perth Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming Mozart by Candlelight, which shares a vision with Tindall’s work of portraying musicians – from tutti violin to Mozart himself – as regular people with jobs, lives and flaws.

Perth Symphony Orchestra’s Pascale Whiting. Photo © Tom Greble

Reading Mozart in the Jungle and bingeing the television series was PSO founder and CEO Bourby Webster’s guilty pleasure during lockdown this year. “It’s larger than life and slightly tongue-in-cheek, but actually for the first time ever it sort of depicted classical musicians as normal people that can appear in a...