I was gratified when Rachel Portman gained an Academy Award nomination for this score. I had the winter to warm up to Chocolat before the nomination was announced, yet found it somehow still satisfying to know that others have responded to this score's quiet charms. There's nothing here that will astonish those who are familiar with Portman's prior work. Her greatest success so far is perhaps the Oscar-winning score to Emma. Yet one listens to this CD and gives constant thanks for the composer's own musical sense and sensibility, which in many ways reflect Miss Austen's: gentility, grace, classical proportion, the qualities one associates both with that author's birth century, and - well - what we used to call civilization . Since such qualities are in severely short order nowadays, let me salute a score which does not have to clamour or claw at you to make its point. I understand the plot of Chocolat involves the confrontation between hedonism and self-restraint. Judging by her music, I think I know where Ms. Portman's sympathies are.

A quibble: The first track is the great Belgian jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt's Minor Swing (not his recording, however). Had I not recognized it, and later, Duke Ellington's Caravan as well, I might easily have assumed Miss Portman wrote both. There is, to be fair, a small-print attribution on the insert track list, but nothing on the CD exterior listing, save 'Music by Rachel Portman'. Can we not do better, Sony, in pointing an unsuspecting and somnolent public to its musical past?