Obama's Big Day - aka Everyone's a Critic

The view of all those people was breathtaking. I also enjoyed watching Perlman and Ma playing off each other toward the end of John Williams' composition, and was thrilled with the playing of clarinetist Anthony McGill. He gets an amazingly pure tone out of his instrument. And what I could hear of the US Navy Band playing Sousa marches after the ceremony was so good - I hope someone is making a CD. The 21-gun salute with artillery instead of rifles took me by surprise, and was pretty impressive.

Other than that, it was pretty blah for me.( Read more... )

The full text of Obama's speech is here on Yahoo News. Details about the pre- and post-game show participants are on about.com's music section.