When the music of classical composers Beethoven, Bach and Mozart was gaining popularity 250 years ago, it’s likely that listeners had no reason to believe it would have the impact it did or that it would still be revered these so many years later.

Similarly, when R&B vocal groups were helping propel the popularity of Motown Records more than 60 years ago, audiences likely didn’t think about the impact it would have or that it still would be around already one quarter as many years as those classical composers’ music.

On Aug. 2, Wednesday, on the opening night of the Service Electric Grandstand Stage at The Great Allentown Fair, the two musical genres combined in a concert by The Four Tops, one of the most commercially successful pop music groups of the 1960s, and the Allentown Symphony Orchestra.

In a one-hour-and-20-minute concert of 19 songs and an additional medley, the Allentown Symphony showed how classical music evolved into popular formats, and The Four Tops proved how easily great music meshes, and why they still are powerful after all these years.

The concert started with 15 minutes of Allentown Symphony Orchestra Music Director and Conductor Diane Wittry leading the more-than-30-member orchestra through four decidedly not Motown songs: Gershwin’s “Strike Up the Band,” the standard “Turkey in the Straw” (which got hearty cheers from the audience), Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” and W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.”

Wittry called it “a tribute to all of the music that led up to the music of The Four Tops.”

The orchestra then was joined by the six-member Four Tops Orchestra, which played a four-minute medley of Four Tops hits with the symphony before the group joined the show.

The vocal group opened with lead singer Theo Peoples largely singing alone on a six-minute cover of Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur’s Park,” a grand composition that sort of bridged the transition from classical to pop-R&B.

Then Peoples told the audience of what looked like less than 2,000, “We came to bring you some old Motown memories,” and the group began that trek with the group’s 1964 breakthrough hit “Baby I Need Your Loving.”

The song demonstrated that The Four Tops’ hits still have the heart-touching feel that made them so relatable and popular.

A quick note: Just as Beethoven, Bach and Mozart are no longer performing their music, The Four Tops no longer has any original members. The group’s last original member, Abdul “Duke” Fakir, died in 2024. Iconic lead singer Levi Stubbs died in 2008.

A voiceover at the start dedicated the concert to the original lineup.

Stubbs’ defining vocals definitely were missed, and the orchestral treatments in some cases diluted some of the intensity and urgency of songs such as the 1967 Top 5 hit “Bernadette.”

But it also helped enhance other big hits: 1965’s Top 5 “It’s the Same Old Song,” for instance (disappointingly cut to just two minutes), and helped rejuvenate lesser hits such as 1966’s “Shake Me Wake Me (When It’s Over)” and, especially, the 1981 R&B chart-topper “When She Was My Girl,” which had the original feel.

That song and others helped remind that The Four Tops had hits, especially on the R&B chart, well into the 1970s, ‘80s and even ‘90s.

“Still Water (Love),” which just missed the Top 10 in 1970, and 1973’s Top 15 “Are You Man Enough” incorporated the funky edge of hits of that decade. The group also offered “Main Street People,” a 1973 R&B Top 10 hit.

Of all the songs, only a cover of Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife” from 1959 seemed an ill fit, but the crowd cheered it hardily.

Of course, the biggest hits got the biggest response, and rightfully so.

The 1973 Top 5 hit “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I Got)” was very good, and the group brought Kevin Wartell, cantor emeritus at Allentown’s Temple Beth El, onstage to sing with them. The song got a huge cheer from the audience.

The night’s best was the group’s biggest, the 1966 No. 1 hit “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” which was the strongest evidence for how good The Four Tops’ songs were.

They had the crowd stand up for the set-closing 1966 Top 10 “Standing In the Shadows of Love,” which was similarly fine, then stayed on stage before regrouping for the “encore” of the 1965 No. hit “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch).”

There were a few disappointments.

The Four Tops were on stage for 57 minutes, and while they played all their biggest hits, their catalog is deep enough to have offered more.

It also was disappointing that The Four Tops often leaned on “oldies” jokes and traps, talking about using Ben Gay muscle cream, about needing to sit down before “When She Was My Girl,” shouting that they were “remembering memories” and having the audience participate.

The concert didn’t need this. It was enough that the music is still powerful after all these years, and equal to classical music.