Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Performs Peter and the Wolf This Sunday
MILWAUKEE, WIS. – The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s Family Concert takes place this Sunday, Nov. 1, at 2:30 p.m. in Allen-Bradley Hall at the Bradley Symphony Center. Associate Conductor Ryan Tani leads a program pairing Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf with the world premiere of How to Escape from the Zoo, a new work by composer Andrew Maxfield and librettist Ruthie Prillaman. Theater company Really Inventive Stuff joins the orchestra, with Sara Valentine and Michael Boudewyns as narrators and performers.
In How to Escape from the Zoo, a “Scheme and Variations,” a zookeeper falls asleep as an elephant plans an escape. The elephant whispers the plan to the lion, who passes it to the lemur; the lemur slips it to a rhino, who spreads it to a shrew. By then, the message has become unrecognizable. The quick-thinking shrew saves the day with a kazoo and an ability to improvise. Maxfield sets the changing message as a series of variations, ending with the shrew’s kazoo improvisation.
Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf follows Peter, a cat, a duck, a wolf and other characters, using the orchestra to introduce children to its instruments. Prokofiev wrote the symphonic tale in 1936 for Moscow’s State Musical Theater for Children, where he liked to take his own family.
Valentine and Boudewyns co-founded Really Inventive Stuff in 2005 to create theatrical programs for young audiences. Their vaudeville-inspired Peter and the Wolf production debuted that year for conductor Rossen Milanov and New Jersey’s Symphony in C. Valentine designed and directed the staging, with Boudewyns as narrator and performer. The production has since been presented more than 180 times with orchestras in North America and abroad. This is Really Inventive Stuff’s third appearance with the MSO.
Tani is in his fourth season with the MSO and second as associate conductor. He leads education, family, film, popular and classical concerts and made his Classics Series debut in 2025, leading sold-out performances. Before coming to Milwaukee, Tani was music director of Baltimore’s Occasional Symphony, where he commissioned more than 20 works in three years.
Maxfield’s music has been performed by the Utah, San Francisco, Omaha, and Salt Lake symphonies and Utah Opera. He recently received a Jury Special Commendation from the King’s Singers New Music Prize. Prillaman co-wrote the middle-grade novel Maple’s Theory of Fun, a USA Today bestseller, and has received libretto commissions from the Utah Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Swarthmore College, Haverford College, and Yale University.
Families can arrive early for pre-concert activities, including an AWE (Artists Working in Education) art activity, a Bradley Symphony Center scavenger hunt, a composer station, an environmental education station with Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, a selfie station and an instrument petting zoo with White House of Music. After the performance, audience members can meet Maxfield, Tani, Valentine, and Boudewyns in the lobby and collect autographs.
The concert lasts approximately 50 minutes and will be performed without intermission. Tickets are available at mso.org, by calling the MSO Box Office at 414.291.7605, or in person at the Bradley Symphony Center, 212 W. Wisconsin Ave.
NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.
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