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Rating: This album, and the film for which it serves as the soundtrack, is a nostalgic bridge to adolescence when I was enchanted by the allure of Coppola's film and the extraordinary talent of its protagonists.
Wojciech Kilar is a contemporary Polish composer who has been working in cinema for a long time: he composed the soundtracks for "Portrait of a Lady" and "The Ninth Gate", and this album represents the zenith of his compositions accompanying images.
Indeed, it's impossible to imagine "Bram Stoker's Dracula" without the smooth and mellifluous music that follows the unfolding of the story or without the power of the gothic rides like "Vampire Hunters," which in the film drove Jonathan Harker's train through the Carpathians as a crimson sky silhouetted the Count's eye. "Dear friend... welcome to the Carpathians, I await you with eagerness...".
The most romantic and melodramatic compositions recount the tormented love between Mina Murray and Dracula, completely absent in the book but there it is, immersing us in the sheets of the two impossible lovers and making us feel the same detachment, the same longing for absolute passion.
There are rare gems like the vocal "apparition" of Diamanda Galas on the track that follows the Count's wives' perversions: where, among Sabbat screams and whispers, her malefic growl unmistakably stands out, while Lucy Westenra's specter walks backward like an insect in her tomb.
The album closes with a song by Annie Lennox: "Love Song for a Vampire" which, although I'm not a fan of hers, I love greatly for the melody's airiness and the decadent allure it exudes.
Ultimately, this is an album that serves as the ideal commentary for many essential gothic novels: let yourself be tempted to read, or reread, Stoker's masterpiece with this CD in the stereo.
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