FEATURE: JMR and the Pops
Perpetually Pushing the Envelope at the Pops by DAVID LYMAN
C
incinnati Pops Conductor John Morris Russell can’t remember exactly when it was that he became aware of Erich Kunzel’s eclectic and wildly popular performances with the Orchestra. It had to have been in the late 1980s or early 90s, long before he was appointed CSO Associate Conductor in 1995. What he does remember was his reaction. “They have cloggers?” JMR recalls saying to the friend who had reported the unusual goingson. “I thought, really? Have they gone insane? But my friend assured me that they hadn’t. ‘No, really,’ he said. ‘It’s fantastic. You have to see it to believe it.’” Much has changed in the decades since JMR’s wide-eyed reaction so early in his career. For one thing, he is leading the Cincinnati Pops now, having been appointed a year after Kunzel passed away in 2009. But JMR’s admiration for the inventive programming that Kunzel brought to the world of Pops programming hasn’t dimmed at all. “Erich was always pushing the envelope, trying to figure out new ways to make creative partnerships.” So, over the years, Cincinnati Pops audiences became accustomed to a steady diet of performances that went far beyond the so-called “light classics.” There were jazz ensembles. And Broadway singers. There was ballet, too, and the cloggers that had surprised JMR so much.
John Morris Russell
“Erich was one of the first to program films with the Orchestra,” says JMR, rattling off a list of timeless movies, from Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin classics. Naysayers—there were still a few—accused Kunzel of turning the Pops into a three-ring circus. In 1998, he lived up to their fears when he programmed an evening with “Cirque de la Symphonie.” Kunzel had seen Cirque co-founder Alexander Streltsov in a show in Naples, Florida the previous year. And Kunzel, being the inveterate showman that he was, decided to bring the Russian acrobat and aerial artist to Cincinnati to perform with the Pops.
Aerialist Alexander Streltsov’s first collaboration with Erich Kunzel and the Pops in July 2005. Credit: Bryan Westbrook
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