The Cincinnati Symphony ran a $3.8 million deficit on an operating budget of $39.9 million in 2007-08, one of the largest shortfalls disclosed to date in a nationwide (soon to be worldwide?) flood of red ink swamping arts organizations.
the orchestra's endowment lost nearly $20 million in value last year, the Cincinnati Enquirer's Janelle Gelfand reports:
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20090127/ENT03/901270343
The performance of John Williams' "Air and Simple Gifts" at President Obama's inauguration was actually a recording. Violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, clarinetist Anthony McGill and pianist Gabriela Montero played along to the recording, inaudible to all but the few spectators seated near them, for the benefit of television cameras.
It was too cold for the musicians to give a reliably good live performance, The New York Times is told:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/arts/music/23band.html?_r=1&hp
Appearing to give live performances of pre-recorded music is commonplace at big public events that are televised, assorted experts explain.
And no, Ma did not play the carbon-fiber cello, widely touted before the event.
Other than that . . .
The Richmond Symphony is betting almost all its chips on the new downtown Richmond CenterStage theater complex, scheduled to open in September.
In a letter to patrons, the orchestra announces that next season it will move its mainstage Masterworks concerts back into the Carpenter Theatre (formerly Carpenter Center), presenting Saturday night and Sunday matinee performances. This will mark the end of Monday night concerts, which the symphony has staged since its debut in 1957.
Pops concerts also will return to the Carpenter Theatre, continuing on Saturday nights, with an additional Sunday matinee for the Christmas-season "Let It Snow!" program. The 1,750-seat venue will be used for a single performance of Handel’s "Messiah."
The symphony will discontinue its Kicked Back Classics casual concert series after this season, replacing it with a "Lollipops" series of educational family concerts, staged at the Carpenter Theatre on Saturday mornings.
The only subscription series to maintain a suburban presence will be four chamber-orchestra concerts. In recent years, they have been festivals centering on composers (Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn). The series will be renamed "Metro Connection," with concerts at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland paired with performances at other, yet to be named venues in the metropolitan Richmond area.
David Fisk, the orchestra's executive director, writes that the changes follow audience "surveys and comments over the past 18 months." He adds: "[E]very effort is being made to assure that there is ample, safe, affordable downtown parking."
The pundits’ verdict on President Obama’s inaugural address – low-key, straightforward, somber – applies as well to the event’s signature music: not the customary Sousa marches and ceremonial tunes, but the pieces unique to this occasion.
Aretha Franklin sang "America (My Country ’Tis of Thee)" as a church singer, rather than a jazz or pop song stylist. Age has lowered the 66-year-old singer’s top notes and some of her vocal flexibility; but she may have tempered the soulful flourishes in any case, because of the profound historical resonance of the ascension of this country’s first president of African descent. R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the occasion, so to speak.
John Williams’ new piece for the inauguration, an Air with Variations on the Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts" (best-known as the main theme of Aaron Copand’s "Appalachian Spring"), was comparably understated, contrasting sharply with the triumphalism and/or emotional button-pushing that characterize his film music. The short piece, played by violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, clarinetist Anthony McGill and pianist Gabriela Montero, has a short stretch of jazzy busyness but for the most part seems to aim for plain-spokenness with a wistful, nostalgic undercurrent.
The most musical moments of the ceremony – to use "musical" in its broadest sense – were spoken, in the Rev. Joseph Lowery’s spiritually affirmative yet playful benediction, in which old-time country preaching (and quotation of James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing") evolved into jazz poetry.
Update: Williams "was falling over himself to convey messages about patriotism and solemnity and austerity and profundity" in his inauguration work, but wound up merely filling "downtime before the main event," writes Anne Midgette in The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/20/AR2009012003560.html
Marc Taddei conducting
Jan. 19, St. Michael Catholic Church
Marc Taddei, of the fourth of nine candidates auditioning to be the next music director of the Richmond Symphony, 
Both works are products not of the 19th-century romantic age but of its afterlife in the early 20th century. The Strauss songs, completed in 1948, the composer’s last year, are overtly retrospective in their texts and their nostalgic musical style. The Rachmaninoff symphony, introduced in 1908, vividly echoes Tchaikovsky in its plush lyricism and dramatic orchestral gestures.
In the last of three performances of this program, Taddei, an American who in recent years has been conducting orchestras in New Zealand, interpreted the Rachmaninoff broadly, with moderate tempos and plenty of rubato in the big lyrical themes. His maintained fine balance between strings and winds, and left ample space for expressive solos by concertmaster Karen Johnson, clarinetist Ralph Skiano and other wind players.
In the Strauss, Taddei and the orchestra were joined by Melissa Citro, a soprano who sounds to be heading into a bright career singing Strauss and Wagner. Her tone is robust from top to bottom, and her phrasing is smooth. Her vocal color palette does not yet extend to some of the dark hues needed to fully express "September" and "Im Abendrot," the most ruminative of the "Four Last Songs;" but her treatment of the best-known of the four, "Beim Schlafengehen," was soulful and thrilling in its emotional climax.
Taddei obtained a richly expressive reading of Strauss’ orchestration, with Johnson, Skiano and French horn player Paul LaFollette contributing eloquent solos.
The Metropolitan Opera, which already had called off costly productions with iffy box-office potential, plans to cut staff salaries by 10 percent and asks for comparable concessions from its unionized workers. As the economy sours, the Met's general manager, Peter Gelb, resists raising ticket prices but fears a deficit rising to the "double-digit" millions, Daniel J. Wakin reports in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/arts/music/16opera.html?ref=music
