Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman faked it.

Oh, they say they had to because it was so cold.

The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation....

Well, hell, they knew it was going to be January. If these candyass classicists can't play in the cold, they should have hired some musicians who can.

***

So we were listening to recorded music when the clock hit noon, the constitutional moment for the President to be sworn in! Then, he was sworn in and that might have been fake and there was a second of that too.

IN THE COMMENTS: Gahrie said:

It was real before it was fake, and after all isn't that all that really matters?

... [A]fter the campaign the president ran, can we really be surprised?

Jason said:

This is amazing. Just yesterday I heard the music show on NPR praising the musicians for their amazing skill "people are still talking about it." God I hate them. You think they're giving you useful information and it turns out to be junk

hdhouse said:

between Ma and Perlman they are using about 5million in instruments that do not like cold. unlike Mr. Bush, they "fake it" for a reason.

I'm fine with them keeping their precious objects out of the cold, but let them keep their precious bodies off the stage. And, yeah, they are different from Bush. Bush was President, and as such, he had to perform, whether the circumstances challenged the limits of his capacity or not. They did not have an obligation. They received an invitation do something they knew they couldn't do, and they accepted it knowing it exceeded their capacity and they would fake it.

Paul Zrimsek said:

Folks, give it up for Milli Violinni!

Simon said:

Still, look on the bright side: Obama hadn't been inaugurated yet, so they sneaked it in under the wire before the trickery was over.

LOL. Very funny! I knew those words would come back to bite me. Let it be known that I am on trickery alert.

Leland said:

Fake but accurate.

Bearing said:

It's not that they didn't play in the cold. It's that they faked playing in the cold. That's just cheesy.

We can give the new president his own super-secure Blackberry, but we can't put four musicians in a heated tent with cameras?

And — considering that $170 million was being spent on the big show — project holograms of them outdoors.

Palladian said:

It's not the crime, it's the cover-up.