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The Cincinnati Pops Orchestra has roots going all the way back to the 1870s but was not officially distinguished from its parent organization, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, until 1977.

The early Cincinnati orchestra society programmed popular music concerts, and that continued with the Cincinnati Symphony, particularly under conductor Max Rudolf, who became its director in 1958. In 1965, Rudolf hired Erich Kunzel as assistant conductor and asked him to conduct the first "8 O'Clock Pops" concert. The "8 O'Clock Pops" series, held during the regular season, joined the CSO's summer "Concerts in the Park" series as the symphony's primary pops music vehicles, raising awareness of the organization through a broader audience. By 1977, the concerts were popular enough for the CSO board to create the subsidiary Cincinnati Pops Orchestra organization, naming Kunzel as its director.

Kunzel led the Pops to a level of fame to rival that of the Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler and John Williams. In addition to sold-out concerts in Cincinnati and appearances around the U.S. in places such as Carnegie Hall and the Grand Ol' Opry, he led it on several international tours, including to Beijing for the opening of the 2008 summer Olympics, and together they made several popular PBS television specials. Kunzel and the orchestra made 85 recordings for Telarc, beginning in 1978 with Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture (although the Cincinnati Symphony received the credit). Their last together, released in 2009 -- the year of Kunzel's death -- was From the Top at the Pops. A preponderance of the recordings appeared in the Top Ten of the Billboard charts, with some of the most famous being Star Tracks (1984), Ein Straussfest (1985) and Ein Straussfest II (1993), Round-Up (1986), Chiller (1989), Christmas with the Pops and Fiesta! (both 1990), and Masters and Commanders (2005).

In September 2011, John Morris Russell became the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra's director, taking up the baton to maintain Cincinnati's standing as a leader among the country's best pops orchestras. Under Russell, the orchestra has continued to record and tour, along with its standard concert schedule. In 2017, the orchestra tour took them to Shanghai and Taiwan. The Cincinnati Pops, under Russell, was nominated for a Grammy award in 2019 for American Originals: 1918, and can be heard on the 2019 album Voyage, both on the Fanfare Cincinnati label. ~ Patsy Morita

Erich Kunzel was dubbed the "Prince of Pops" by the Chicago Tribune in 1977 and became one of the most successful Billboard Classical/Crossover recording artists in history. He was born in New York and raised in Connecticut. He attended Dartmouth College, where he decided on music as a career. He earned degrees at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Brown and went to Hancock, Maine, to study conducting with Pierre Monteux.

His professional conducting career began with the Santa Fe Opera in 1957. He also became a personal assistant to Pierre Monteux. Kunzel attracted the attention of another renowned teacher of conductors, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra's music director Max Rudolf, who invited Kunzel to become a resident conductor with the orchestra. One of the duties of that position was to lead concerts in the "Eight O'Clock Pops" series. He debuted with the Cincinnati Symphony in October, 1965, leading one of the pops concerts and showed an immediate affinity for this kind of presentation. Kunzel had not considered this area of music as his career objective, but quickly decided he liked it. Arthur Fiedler, noting Kunzel's work, invited him to guest conduct his Boston Pops Orchestra in 1970. He was invited back to the Boston Pops every year under Fiedler and his two successors John Williams and Keith Lockhart, and made over 85 appearances with the original Boston Pops orchestra and taken it on tour.

Kunzel made recordings with labels associated with the Vox record company while making the "Eight O'Clock Pops" even more of a favorite in Cincinnati. In 1977, the board of the orchestra decided to follow the organizational example of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and constitute a Cincinnati Pops Orchestra as a separate sub-organization using members of the main orchestra, and appointed Kunzel its conductor. Five years later he was also appointed pops conductor of the symphony orchestra in nearby Indianapolis in 1982. He went on to conduct over 200 pops concerts there and many more in Detroit, Toronto, Minnesota, and Naples, Florida. He held the records for attendance at Chicago's Ravinia Festival and Cleveland's Blossom Music Festival -- over 22,000 in each venue.

In the 1980s, Telarc records, began recording in Cincinnati and included the Pops in its program. Beginning with the legendary Straussfest recording, they produced an unprecedented series of audio spectaculars including classical repertory, Broadway, popular song albums, and movie score compilations. Kunzel recorded 100 releases, including 70 on Telarc. Fifty of them have been on the Billboard charts. He has been the Billboard Top Classical/Crossover Artist of the year several times, including an unprecedented four years in a row. He was won the Grand Prix du Disque in Europe, the Award for Classical Album of the Year 1989 from the Japan Record Association, Sony's Tiffany Walkman Award, and four Grammy nominations.

He often appeared on television, most prominently in Fourth of July and Memorial Day concerts with the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, D.C., playing on the Mall in an annual PBS television broadcast. He has played in the Fourth of July series annually since 1990. The 1996 appearance was the largest PBS audience ever for a musical event and drew nearly a million people to hear the concert live.

Kunzel has taught on the faculties of Brown University and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He conducted opera performances with the Cincinnati Opera and the Canadian Opera Company. He received numerous awards and recognition, including the 1994 Presidential Medal for Outstanding Leadership and Achievement from Dartmouth and the 1995 Salvation Army "Others" Award.

Immediately upon his death from cancer in 2009, Kunzel was named Founder and Conductor Emeritus by a unanimus vote of the Cincinnati Symphony's board.