By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
From October 25, 2011:
I’m at Elizabeth Spann Craig’s (@elizabethscraig) site with a piece on contemporary classical music for mystery writers. Please join me there for the whole post, which includes some great music by leading, living composers. Here’s a little of that piece:
Appointment With Death is Agatha Christie’s travelogue-gone-wrong, set in the “rose red city of Petra.” And some years ago, when I directed Christie’s 1945 stage adaptation of it, I reached for Vivaldi.
I wanted some big, noisy, precisely orchestrated suspense to get my big, noisy, endlessly patient actors into an opening tableaux. And by setting this whole thing in the swamp-gassy gloom of a weird hotel lobby, I could also show off the smart elevator our designers had rigged up for the stage.
So I used the first movement of the Winter concerto from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Sounds like the kind of blizzard that gets Mayor Bloomberg into trouble. Worked like a charm. We managed to get the “detestable” Mrs. Boynton into her seat right on the button of that string-section snowstorm every time.
But how I wish I’d had Q2 Music then. Because I’d have used something far more atmospheric, closer to the exotic locale.