Tchaikovsky & Dvořák

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• Named after the famed English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Perkinson was born in 1932 in New York. During his career, Perkinson arranged songs for Harry Belafonte and Marvin Gaye. He scored films starring Sydney Poitier, Cisely Tyson and Muhammed Ali. Alvin Ailey and the Dance Theatre of Harlem commissioned his ballet scores. However, Perkinson’s deepest desire was to become a composer and conductor of classical music. At age 23, his first string quartet was played in Carnegie Hall and a decade later Perkinson co-founded the country’s first fully integrated professional symphony orchestra, the Symphony of the New World.

• WSO principal cellist Yuri Hooker performed Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme during the Canadian Conductor Showcase last fall. Maestro Raiskin felt it was such a wonderful performance, he wanted to feature it again for audiences.

• The work was Tchaikovsky’s first composition for cello and orchestra and its’ style was inspired by his role model Mozart.

• Invented in the early 16^thcentury, “cello” is actually only a nickname. It is the abbreviation of the full name violoncello, which, in Italian, means a “small large viol.”