Dear player!
The game freezes in the menu for a longer time (not permanently) because the CD32 reading speed is 300KB/Sec. If you have a sufficiently large Fast Ram, it will preload the actual music into the Ram in advance so that it does not have to be read in parallel with the animation. Since the menu music size is 6.3MB, this all takes time.
So, answering your other suggestion, the game uses Fast Ram if it is available, but I cannot speed up the CD reading speed. If I want the game to be faster and not load while playing, I have to wait for the music to load at the beginning. These qualities go hand in hand. If there is no Fast Ram, there is no loading time at the beginning but the game is visibly slower because it loads everything on the fly from CD (both anim+audio)!
As we have already written in several places (including below), the CD32 disk image was created mainly to make things easier for emulator users.