Biography
The Cincinnati Pops Orchestra was founded in 1977 and Erich Kunzel was named its conductor. Maestro Kunzel continues to lead the Pops today. It was Maestro Max Rudolf who, in 1965, invited Erich Kunzel, then a young conductor on the faculty of Brown University, to join the orchestra. That October the Dartmouth graduate, who had been personal assistant to French conductor Pierre Monteux, conducted his first sold-out 8 O’Clock Pops concert. It was the beginning of a modern orchestral legend and, four decades later, the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra under its first and only conductor is still performing for packed houses in Cincinnati’s Music Hall and gaining new fans the world over through tour performances and its recordings on the Telarc label.
The Cincinnati Pops Orchestra is part of the umbrella organization, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and is one of the world’s most active classical pops ensembles, performing 20 subscription concerts during the Music Hall season and 10 concerts at Riverbend Music Center, the orchestra’s outdoor summer home. The Cincinnati Pops is also one of only a few U.S. orchestras with a commercial recording contract (with Telarc International, the Cleveland-based Grammy Award-winning label). They record two albums per year for Telarc.
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Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.