Poor soundtrack on my DVD?

I saw this film a few times in cinemas in the decade after it appeared, and it was always in my top ten US movies (and top 50 worldwide movies).

Purchased a DVD recently and watched it last night for the first time in 25 years or more. The DVD has subtitles in French and Spanish but oddly no closed captions in English, although the letter-box format offers the ideal location for them.

My hearing may have dimmed a little over the years and my TV and player are only standard quality, but I rarely have problems with other US movies.

Despite having the volume turned well up I had trouble hearing a lot of the dialogue, mainly from the female actresses. Keaton, Streep and Hemingway mumbled a lot of their lines.

Then the music score was deafening at times. I had to keep adjusting the volume level. I understand that the cinematography was the real star of this film, perhaps intentionally so, and it seems that the music was intended to co-star. The problem is that Gershwin is not good enough to carry a movie and obscure the dialog. He is a "pop" classical composer, not a Barber, Copland, or even a Leonard Bernstein.

The over-use of scores is pervasive in US movies but I expect better of serious directors. As it happened, the previous film I watched was Aki Kaurismäki's "The man without a past" (2002), which has so much music in it, both diegetic and extradiegetic, that it could have been made as a musical, yet the music never interferes with the story or dialog, so sensitively and supportively was it used.

I still greatly admire Woody Allen's work, but the more I see from directors previously unknown to me from World Cinema (such as Kaurismäki, Kiarostami and Bertrand Tavernier) the less stellar Allen's films seem in comparison. This one now rates 8 in my book, not 9 as previously.