Cinti Symphony & Pops Orchestras

The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which also performs as the Cincinnati Pops, celebrates its 125th anniversary in the 2019-20 season. One of America’s finest and most versatile ensembles, the internationally acclaimed CSO attracts the best musicians, artists and conductors from around the world to Cincinnati. With new commissions and groundbreaking initiatives like LUMENOCITY®, One City, One Symphony, The Pelléas Trilogy, and the MusicNOW Festival collaboration, the Orchestra is committed to being a place of experimentation.


Louis Langrée began his tenure as the CSO's 13th Music Director in the 2013-14 season with a celebrated program The New York Times said “deftly combined nods to the orchestra's history, the city's musical life and new music.” Over the Orchestra's 123-year history, it has also been led by Leopold Stokowski, Eugène Ysaÿe, Fritz Reiner, Eugene Goossens, Max Rudolf, Thomas Schippers, Jesús López-Cobos, and Paavo Järvi, among others.


A champion of new music, the Orchestra has given American premieres of works by such composers as Debussy, Ravel, Mahler and Bartók and has commissioned works that have since become mainstays of the classical repertoire, including Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man. The CSO was the first orchestra to be broadcast to a national radio audience (1921) and the third to record (1917). The Orchestra continues to commission new works and to program an impressive array of music. In recent years, the CSO has performed the world premieres by Nico Muhly, David Lang, Caroline Shaw and Daniel Bjarnason as part of the groundbreaking collaboration with the MusicNOW Festival, as well world premieres from André Previn, Gunther Schuller, Michael Fiday, T. J. Cole, Jonathan Bailey Holland and Kristin Kuster. The Orchestra’s most recent commercial recording, Concertos for Orchestra, also features commissioned works by Sebastian Currier, Thierry Escaich and Zhou Tian.


The CSO was the first American orchestra to make a world tour sponsored by the Department of State and continues to tour domestically and internationally, most recently to Asia in March and a celebrated three-week European tour in August and September that included debuts at the BBC Proms, Edinburgh International Festival and the Quincena Musical de San Sebastián. The CSO has performed at New York's Carnegie Hall 48 times since its debut there in 1917, most recently to rave reviews in May of 2014. In January of 2016, the Orchestra performed at New York’s Lincoln Center as part of the invitational Great Performers series.


The CSO is Cincinnati's own and committed to enhancing and expanding music education for the children of Greater Cincinnati and works to bring music education, in its many different forms, to as broad a public as possible. Education and outreach programs currently serve more than 80,000 individuals annually.
In 2015, the Orchestra announced the CSO/CCM Diversity Fellowship, a nationally recognized program in partnership with the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. Born out of a mutual desire to make American orchestras more inclusive, this groundbreaking, two-year fellowship program just graduated its first class and welcomes its third class of four post-graduate fellows to Cincinnati in the fall of 2018.