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Rating: This salsamerenghizzazzione of all audible knowledge has now reached heights of hallucination that were unimaginable until yesterday. Patience for the similar commercial operations of Radiohead songs (see the album Radiodread here renamed on the occasion as Radiodread) remade, indeed, with congas in merengue and reggae sauce, or Coldplay and Pink Floyd reworked with the same treatment, already makes your skin crawl for the sacrilegious operation.
Nothing to be done. The Cuban steamroller machine has found new fuel for its engine. Here is, in fact, this "Mozart Meets Cuba" (2005) where, from the very title, it is evident that this time the one to pay the price is the late genius of classical and opera music most appreciated in the world.
It grates and feels rather odd to hear “The Magic Flute” covered with Caribbean rhythms complete with ad hoc sketches, or the “Sonata in C Minor K457” (here renamed “Guantanameritmo”!!!) mimicking the mournful Cuban rhythms inserted in an excessively forced manner.
In short, it's enough to spend hours doubled over the toilet vomiting for this absolutely gratuitous outrage, born from that “strange and illogical cheerfulness” (as Mr. G would say) that for some years now has tended to standardize and mix the most disparate things under the banner of novelty at any cost.
Novelties created at the drawing board to pander to markets now willing to ingest and blend anything just to sell a few more CDs in an already collapsing market. Ten years ago, it was New Age frying the brains of exhausted yuppies returning from work; today, evidently, this task falls to Salsa & Merengue Music, evidently... more disengaged and, let's be honest, decidedly more ignorant.
Some pieces are also curious and well-played, with beautiful scores rich in precise and syncopated breaks worthy of the best groove, mind you... that is, the technical and arrangement level is commendable, but at the end of the album, there's a strange disappointment for having listened to something that doesn't belong anywhere, an amorphous hybrid like certain soufflés concocted by Woody Allen at the start of his career, with this absurd combination that sounds, in many parts, excessively forced and constructed to the point of being irritating if not “mindless.” Melting Pop and Crossover are fine, intelligent contaminations are probably the only still explorable frontier in the realm of contemporary music, but when you try to bring together worlds that are themselves very far apart (in this case, the delicate harmony of certain baroque suites of unforgettable arias from the late '700s with the naive solar danceability of the Caribbean people), the results can only leave us bewildered.
Let us expect at this rate Keith Jarrett rapped by Piotta, Tebaldi sampled on African polyrhythms or Pavarotti (may he rest in peace) remixed by Kruder & Dorfmeister. On this front, Sting and his latest soporific classical lullaby have already broken through the door...
Tracklist
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