Dracula. The music.
by Lawrence Cosentino

For me, the scariest thing about “Dracula” wasn’t the bats, the dead baby, the crazy fly-eating guy, yadda yadda. Try talking to a sallow, exhausted, sunken-eyed Russian composer who has just spent weeks in his basement with knobs and dials and is now in the throes of post-creation anxiety.

“I have done nothing else for the past month,” said Sergei Kvitko of his mad, way-better-than-necessary score for Riverwalk’s production of “Dracula.” What made Kvitko weave furiously evocative fugues and passacaglias when a few judiciously placed schlock chords would have done the job? What made him wring a heart-rending faux oboe solo out of his electronic palette where others would have settled for synthesized, zee-wee-ahh atmospherics?

And what’s up with that tiny Philip Glass reference that gets run through with a musical stake after about seven seconds? “I hate Philip Glass,” says Kvitko. “I spend a great deal of time thinking about how much I hate Philip Glass.”

Big clue there. No short cuts, no cut-and-paste minimalism will suit this man. Just as film director Eric von Stroheim insisted that his actors wear period underwear, Kvitko wove a borderline insane level of care and sophistication into every bar of his score even when you can barely hear it.

OK, so the howling wolf groove thing is cheesy. PETA won’t like it one bit. But that’s just intermission music. As far as I’m concerned, while the show is on — and this is just the kind of remark you’d expect from a music critic – “Dracula” itself, for all its spectacle and atmosphere, is a playtrack to the original sound.

Dracula. Original Music by Sergei Kvitko

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