Cleveland Pops Orchestra

The Cleveland Pops Orchestra is a professional pops orchestra that plays mostly at Severance Music Center, the grand 1931 hall on Cleveland's east side, with additional dates at Playhouse Square downtown and an outdoor summer concert on Ely Square in Elyria. Programs are built around film scores, Broadway numbers, big band and swing standards, and tributes to individual singers and songwriters, usually with guest vocalists and sometimes a chorus. This season's listings show seven pops programs plus a holiday concert. Expect a full symphony orchestra playing familiar tunes, spoken introductions from the stage, and an evening that assumes no prior concert experience. Dress is casual, and the outdoor Elyria date is free and family friendly.

The Cleveland Pops Orchestra was founded in 1995 by conductor Carl Topilow, who wanted the city to have a dedicated pops ensemble of its own, drawing on the deep pool of professional players in Northeast Ohio. Topilow, long the head of the orchestral program at the Cleveland Institute of Music, led the orchestra from its first concerts and became its public face, known for an onstage clarinet turn and for conducting in a manner that keeps talking to the audience between numbers.

From early on the orchestra made its home at Severance Hall, now called Severance Music Center, the 1931 building on University Circle that is also the winter home of the Cleveland Orchestra. Playing a pops season in that room gave the group an unusual setting for repertoire that elsewhere often lands in arenas or ballrooms. Over the years the orchestra has added performances at Playhouse Square downtown and outdoor summer concerts in surrounding communities, including Elyria, where it plays free in Ely Square.

Programming has stayed close to American popular music of the last century: movie music, musical theater, swing and big band, salutes to figures such as Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, and an annual holiday concert that has become the group's best attended event. Guest singers, instrumental soloists and local choruses appear regularly, and the orchestra has performed with visiting artists from the jazz and Broadway worlds.

Today the Cleveland Pops presents a compact season of roughly eight concerts, most at Severance, and continues to function as an entry point for listeners who have never bought a ticket to a symphony concert.