Illuminata: Music From The John Turturro Film

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At the end of 1999, John Turturro's film Illuminata gradually made its way around the U.S., mostly on the art-house circuit. It is an intriguing film, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom's score serves it well. As an independent listening experience, though, the film music isn't satisfactory. Bolcom's purposefully bizarre blend of ragtime and Rossini gets to be an old joke after a while, and the composer's exquisite melodic sense--so memorably demonstrated by his Graceful Ghost rag and elsewhere--would have drawn too much attention to itself in a film score, so it's absent. Some of the orchestra's string playing, under the direction of experienced Broadway conductor Abba Bogin, is distractingly scrappy, a further detriment to enjoying this intermittently intriguing but ultimately disappointing disc.