Dangerous Liaisons: The Music
Listen to a 60 sec. Dangerous Liaisons Teaser
Listen to a 5 min. Dangerous Liaisons Teaser
The Original Concept Recording
Complete, every note. It's just like sitting
in on the whole show!
This 3CD set, the only recording available of the original version in its entirety, includes
liner notes with a full reprint of Johnathan Daniel Steppe's brilliant and compelling original libretto, and features composer
Malcolm Caluori's dazzling original orchestrations. The talented cast includes Shaun Whitley's amazing Valmont
and powerhouse Maura Carey as the Marquise.
On Composing the Score to Dangerous Liaisons
by Malcolm Caluori
This is a period story, and when Johnathan
and I decided to take on the project, we decided almost immediately to keep it in its original setting. This
decision led me to make several decisions about how I wanted the music to sound, and the show itself to feel.
With any period in history, comes a period in musical history. And with this show, at least as far
as the setting is concerned, we are dealing with the specific musical atmosphere of the French Baroque, bringing with it a
rich setting of developing musical forms, the birth of chamber music, and handily enough, a strong social and artistic focus
on the rise of the opera.
Dangerous
Liaisons the musical, is not a period piece. This is
not a Baroque opera. But the melodrama of the story, and the strong convergence of music with the lives
of the aristocracy, lend themselves naturally to music. And I felt that it was not only necessary, but
also inevitable that the taste of the score would involve more than just mere indications of the music of the period.
It was important to embroider the sounds of the time into the score in order to take the audience into the world of
these characters. But for me, even as a composer, the drama itself must always come first.
So in the score one can expect the drama of each scene to
be told with contemporary musical devices, but tinged with rhythms characteristic to the period, and the sounds of a harpsichord,
or perhaps a pair of recorders. Further, there are no low brass instruments in the orchestration, only
horns and a trumpet, and there is even a scene which parodies the comic opera buffa (or in French, opéra
comique). But even with such stylistic references, this is most definitely modern musical theatre,
and it has been a joy to create.
As well as composing and orchestrating the score to Dangerous Liaisons, Malcolm Caluori also cast and produced
the Original Concept Recording, directed the music and vocalists and personally oversaw the coordination of all aspects of the recording process, including
sound design and effects, editing, mixing, mastering, and even graphic design.
