The Cleveland Orchestra is giving away free tickets to its fourth annual Hispanic Heritage Month celebration, a Saturday night concert packed with salsa, cumbia, vallenato and merengue rhythms alongside traditional Venezuelan drums. The free performance is set for 7 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 3, at Severance Music Center in University Circle, with tickets distributed on a first-come, first-served basis.
According to Cleveland.com, the evening will feature the Fusion Latina Ensemble performing with guest vocalists Ale Almanza and Mai Zambrano. The concert requires tickets despite being free, and those can be reserved online at clevelandorchestra.com, by phone at 216-231-1111, or in person at the Severance Music Center box office, per the same report from writer Zachary Lewis.
Before the downbeat, concertgoers can warm up with pre-concert dancing in the Grand Foyer of Severance Music Center, with music supplied by DJ IAmYulissa. The night's host, Claudia DeLeon, brings her own broadcasting credentials to the stage as Head of Spanish Broadcast Operations at Urban One, a role tied to the company's November 2024 Local Management Agreement bringing the “La Mega” Spanish-language radio format to 1300 WJMO-AM, according to a PR Newswire release. DeLeon was named Vice President and General Manager of Urban One's Cleveland market that same day.
A Tradition Rooted in Local Latin Music
This year's concert continues a pattern the Cleveland Orchestra has followed since at least 2023, when its Hispanic Heritage Month celebration featured Latin jazz percussionist Sammy DeLeon y su Orquesta, emceed by then-WKYC news anchor Lydia Esparra, according to BroadwayWorld. In 2025, the free concert returned on September 13 with Sammy DeLeon y su Orquesta again on the bill, this time joined by flamenco dancer Alice Blumenfeld, per the Cleveland Orchestra's own event listing.
The concert falls within National Hispanic Heritage Month, the federal observance running from September 15 to October 15 each year. That 31-day window was established when President Ronald Reagan signed Public Law 100-402 on August 17, 1988, expanding what began in 1968 as National Hispanic Heritage Week under a law signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson after it was introduced by California Congressman George E. Brown, according to the Library of Congress and the National Archives.
Free Access Backed by Corporate Philanthropy
Programs like this one are part of a broader civic engagement effort by the orchestra, which also hosts an annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Concert at Severance and summer community concerts at Cain Park. KeyBank serves as the official Community Access Partner underwriting the orchestra's free civic programming, an initiative tied to $3 million the bank's foundation awarded to Cleveland-area nonprofits in December 2024.
That kind of underwriting matters in a city where the audience for Spanish-language and Latin cultural programming has grown substantially. Hispanic and Latino residents made up 13.1% of Cleveland's population, or 48,699 residents, according to 2020 U.S. Census Bureau data compiled by the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission — a 23.2% increase from 2010.
A Historic Hall Hosts a Modern Sound
Severance Music Center, formerly known as Severance Hall, has stood in University Circle since it opened on February 5, 1931, following a $2.6 million construction project funded largely by industrialist John L. Severance, according to Cleveland Historical. Nearly a century later, the hall built for classical programming will once again fill its Grand Foyer with salsa and cumbia before turning its main stage over to a genre-blending Latin ensemble, continuing a now-established October ritual for the orchestra and its Northeast Ohio audience.
