Wow, I'm impressed that it would only cost $11,000 to record multiple full-orchestra symphonies.
They play Beethoven symphonies every year at least 1-2 times
Heck, if I can get a full orchestra to play me a symphony for a thousand bucks then I might just do it for fun.
http://www.moscow-orchestra.com/rates.html
The parent article here implies they will be recording, e.g., all of Beethoven's symphonies, etc. Off the top of my head, this project sounds like at least a week's work, even assuming the players know the music well.
40 players + 5 miscellaneous (conductor, recording engineer, whatever), say, 45 people for a week at $11,000 comes out to around $6/hour. I'm not saying the guy is lying about it, I'm just amazed at how inexpensive this appears to be. Even double that rate, or triple it... that's some pretty awesome work you can get done for that amount of money.
But as I said, I've never recorded an orchestra before; my guesstimates may well be skewed. Even so, at the numbers you are quoting, that's quite a bit lower than I would have guessed earlier today. :-)