The Coast of Utopia - Original Music by Mark Bennett

Incidental music for the stage need not be limited to the stage only. At its best, it can hold its own in the concert hall, independent of the play for which it was composed. And if so, why not on disc?

Consider, among many examples, Grieg's music for Peer Gynt Vaughan Williams's for The Wasps, Fauré's or Sibelius' for Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy's for Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien or, to come nearer the matter at hand, Prokofiev's for Hamlet and Shostakovich's for Hamlet, King Lear and The Bedbug.

But if we now listen to the CD of Mark Bennett's music for the recent Lincoln Center Theater production of Tom Stoppard's trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, the main effect is that of dullness. Jack O'Brien, who magisterially directed the trilogy in New York with Bennett's music, gushes almost to the end of his program note about what that music did for the plays. Only at the end of the note does he remark, "That the music, in this CD, stands alone is, in my estimation, a genuine miracle."

I do not dispute that the music worked for the stage—at the very least because it did not call too much attention to itself. Most reviews did not even mention it, which may not be attributable solely to the thickness of the reviewers.

[IMG:R]The music calls for 10 instrumentalists playing accordion, violin, trumpet, balalaika doubling on mandolin, piano, oboe, guitar, viola, clarinet doubling on flute and cello—a nicely varied ensemble that can cover a lot of ground and allows for fetching combinations. But what I hear on the CD lacks a single melody that sticks in my mind.

It is true that the individual movements of what, on CD, becomes a suite, are very short. There are 38 of them on a disc that in its entirety lasts only 35 minutes and 31 seconds, which already makes it a dubious purchase. It is obviously harder to make an impression with such brevity. However, even the generally pallid orchestration adds to the forgettability.

Not even such potentially rousing numbers as "Moscow," "Paris" and "The Ginger Cat Waltz" make much of an impression. Indeed, the music for the curtain call, which, at two minutes and twenty seconds, has some room to develop in, takes merely negligible advantage of the opportunity. The only movement that registers on me is number 25, "Dejeuner sur l'herbe, for the Manet-ish picnic scene. It consists mainly of a flute and piano duo, and makes for a pleasant enough pastorale.

Matters are not helped by Felicity LaFortune, who gets two numbers based on the "Marseillaise" and delivers the words of the French national anthem with an atrocious accent, despite her Gallic name. She is better in Italian in two song snatches, though even there she is bested in a duet with David Pittu—actor rather than singer—who scores in an effective solo. (Later in the season, he was wonderful as Bertolt Brecht in the musical Love/Musik.)

Although only the second play in The Coast of Utopia is entitled "Shipwreck," Mark Bennett's score on its own is a shipwreck pretty much all the way.