Inspired Mozart: Music To Enhance Your Spirit

One of the things I’ve noticed about the Old Lady CDs is how functional they are. Rather, how they all portray themselves as fulfilling a non-artistic function. There are albums to catch you up on an artist’s best tracks, albums to set the mood for the holidays, albums for focus or meditation or whatever. Even some of the records from artists I recognize have ulterior motives. This one is as blatant as it gets. Classical Music is good for you, it says. In order to be a better person, you must suffer through it. Eat your auditory vegetables.

I don’t have to be bullied into listening to classical music by the musical equivalent of an office motivational poster (the cover and interior booklet literally look like one) - I listen to it because I like it. Music has moved me to tears only twice. The second time was listening to “The Impression That I Get” after learning that my godfather’s cancer was terminal. The first time was in the balcony of Heinz Hall, as the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra strings crept into the Thaxted melody at the halfway point of the Jupiter movement of The Planets by Gustav Holst. As the whole of the brass section joined the strings in their yearning and striving, I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit.

I did not feel the presence of the Holy Spirit on this record. It’s a compilation of various orchestras, under various engineers, excerpted, over-compressed, and chucked together in an unsatisfying sequence. “Piano Sonata in F Major” sounded too aggressive with pumping compression and sharp highs. The “Don Giovann” excerpt is awfully-mic’d to the point where the clacking of the clarinet’s stuck keys are as loud as the melody at points. The Violin & Viola duet manages to make Yitzhak “Motherfucking” Perlman sound thin, squashed, and unpleasant. Add all that to the fact that I think Mozart is overrated in the first place, and you get a thoroughly unlikable record.

Inspired Mozart: Music to Enhance Your Spirit is a bad record, and I don’t like it.