Whether you loved or hated the classical music played at US President Barack Obama’s inauguration, unless you were sitting within earshot of the celebrated quartet, what you heard was a recording made two days earlier.
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Itzhak Perlman, pianist Gabriella Montero and clarinetist Anthony McGill made the decision a day before Tuesday’s inauguration after a sound check to use a previously recorded audio tape for the broadcast of the ceremonies.
Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said the weather was too cold for the instruments to stay in tune.
“They were very insistent on playing live until it became clear that it would be too cold,” said Florman in a telephone interview Thursday night.
People sitting nearby could hear the musicians play Air and Simple Gifts, written for the inauguration by John Williams, but their instruments were not amplified.
“It would have been a disaster if we had done it any other way,” Perlman told the New York Times, which first reported that the music was taped on its Web site Thursday. “This occasion’s got to be perfect. You can’t have any slip-ups.”
The Marine Band, the youth choruses and the Navy Band Sea Chanters performed live, Florman said, although Aretha Franklin was accompanied by taped music and voices.
Florman said all the acts “laid down tape” before Tuesday’s inauguration. When they did their sound checks on Monday, all but the quartet made the decision to have their live performances broadcast.
Temperatures hovered around minus 1ºC for the ceremony on the Capitol steps, too cold for McGill’s clarinet, Ma’s cello or Perlman’s violin to offer true pitch.
But the cold played havoc with the piano, which can’t hold tune below 13ºC for more than two hours, Florman said. The group played at 11:43am and guests seated near them could hear them as well as the tape made two days earlier.
Guests seated farther away, the crowds that thronged the National Mall, and the millions who watched around the world heard the taped version of Williams’ piece.
“No one’s trying to fool anybody. This isn’t Milli Vanilli,” Florman insisted, referring to the late 1980s group stripped of a Grammy for lip-syncing. “They had to perform in such cold weather, the instruments couldn’t possibly be in tune. They were able to play in sync with the tape. It’s not unusual,” she said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS