“Everyone’s Italian tonight,” host and conductor Carl Topilow exclaimed, greeting the capacity Cleveland POPS audience at Severance Hall on Saturday, April 13. With the engaging assistance of soprano Alyson Cambridge, tenor John Cudia, and the POPS Chorus — not to mention a special green, white, and red clarinet, assembled from Topilow’s multichromatic collection of instruments — the Orchestra lined up and checked off 21 of everyone’s favorite selections from Italian opera, leaving few corners of the repertoire unexplored.

A golden age in American popular music began about a century ago. Lasting four decades and pervading musical theater, sound recordings, film, radio, and jazz stylings, it left a body of music that has never gone out of circulation and is regularly trumpeted as one of America’s best collective creations. We now call it “The Great American Songbook.”