If you attend one of those “Valentine’s Day Love Classics” concerts next week, and sense that the musicians are playing with more than their customary snap, crackle and pop, you may well be right. Within the ranks of Britain’s orchestras, it seems, love is all around. Well, naked lust anyway. In a survey that appears to have leapt straight from the pages of a Jilly Cooper bonkbuster, this month’s Musomagazine asked classical musicians to say which sort of instrumentalists make the best lovers, which the worst — and which, to put the matter bluntly, are cramming so much rumpy-pumpy into their waking hours that you wonder how they find time to practise their scales and arpeggios.

On the latter question, stand up and take a bow, viola-players of the world! They may have been the prime butt of musicians’ jokes since time immemorial, but in their secretive, self-effacing way, they seem to be a bunch of right ravers. They top the table of musicians deemed “most likely to have sex on a first date”, and also of those “most likely to have had more than ten sexual partners”. (Admittedly, the question didn’t specify whether the partners had to be human, or even animate.)

Least likely to have had sex on a first date, or to have had more than ten sexual partners, are those who play my own noble instrument — the trombone. I refuse to be at all defensive about that. So we trombonists are courteous, steadfast types. Is that so wrong?

In any case, I’m pleased to see that the trombone is nowhere near the top of the “least sexy instrument” list. I’m afraid the tuba — clearly still trying to overcome its “tubby” image — wins that accolade by a mile, followed by the bassoon. No wonder that tuba players are also deemed “most likely to be single”. By a strange coincidence, the bassoon and the tuba are also the two instruments that nobody ever wants to play at school. Can’t imagine why.

Sexiest instrument? The cello. Musicians who make the best lovers? Cellists. That’s what the survey says, anyway. Perhaps there’s some truth in it. After all, it was a cellist who featured in the best-ever story about musicians and sex. Just turned 80, the great Pablo Casals proposed marriage to a twentysomething pupil, and was accepted. On his wedding day his doctor and friends approached him. “You should be very careful tonight, Pablo,” they said. “Think of the health risk.”

Casals brushed them impatiently aside. “I’m going to enjoy myself,” he said. “And if the girl dies, she dies.”

Putting aside instrumental rivalries, do musicians in general make better lovers than people in other professions? It’s hard to generalise, of course, but it seems clear that musicians do have several advantages.

First, wind players require extraordinary muscular skills in their lips and tongue. Need I elaborate? Similarly, string players and pianists, almost by definition, have supple and wonderfully educated fingers. Secondly, the precise mental attributes that make a great musician — notably a highly developed, almost telepathic, sense of empathy with colleagues — also contribute greatly to sensitive lovemaking (or so I’m told). Thirdly, musicians are immersed in intense emotions all day, which means that they never really stop thinking about passion in one form or another.

And fourthly, since they often spend weeks on the road — thrown together in dreary hotels with a lot of spare time to kill and their partners hundreds of miles away — they have both the opportunity and incentive to grab a little passing nookie. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, no matter what strategies they devise to conceal their assignation, everyone in the orchestra invariably knows about it the next day.

So does all this strenuous nocturnal activity have a good or a bad effect on musical standards? I doubt if it has the slightest impact either way, though there is a wonderful story about the conductor Sir John Barbirolli that suggests otherwise. Barbirolli was sitting in his dressing-room in Manchester, waiting to conduct his beloved Hallé Orchestra, when the distraught wife of one of his violinists rushed in. “I’m so miserable, Sir John,” she wailed. “I’ve just discovered my husband is having an affair.”

“My dear, there’s nothing to worry about,” Barbirolli replied consolingly. “He’s playing better than ever.”

Which reminds me — two musical trades are hardly represented in Muso’s survey. The first is conductors. That’s inexplicable, because many eminent baton-wagglers are among the world’s most indefatigable serial adulterers. (What was it that Henry Kissinger said about power being a great aphrodisiac?)

And the second? Music critics, of course. But perhaps it’s kinder not to intrude on private grief.

For full survey results see the February edition of Muso magazine

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