‘Peter and the Wolf’ leads to musical mayhem

When the composer Nathaniel Stookey was a young violinist in the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, a centerpiece of every year was the orchestra’s annual holiday performance of “Peter and the Wolf.” Other pieces came and went in the repertoire, but Prokofiev’s exuberant folk tale was a perennial.

“It’s an important part of the Youth Orchestra culture, because it’s the only piece that gets done over and over again,” says Stookey, 47. “It has a special place for Youth Orchestra players, and it was a piece I really got to know in a way that I didn’t with anything else.