Metrowest Symphony Orchestra Music Director

Dr. Peter L. Cokkinias

This is Peter Cokkinias’s 31st year conducting the Metrowest Symphony Orchestra. Among Cokkinias’s conducting mentors are Erich Leinsdorf, Seiji Ozawa, John Williams, Andre Previn, Thomas Schippers, Boris Goldovsky, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein, with whom he studied at Tanglewood. Cokkinias made his New York debut at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall conducting the Atlantic Sinfonietta in the U.S. premiere of George Benjamins’s A Mind of Winter.

Cokkinias is equally at home conducting symphony, opera, ballet, and theater orchestras. He has conducted orchestras in Massachusetts, including the Boston Pops and the Boston Ballet, as well as in Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, Kentucky, New York and Texas. During his tenure at Tufts University he founded the Tufts Opera Theater and produced seven fully-staged operas. As a faculty member at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Cokkinias founded the Berklee Contemporary Symphony Orchestra. He is Music Director  and Conductor of the Musical Theater Orchestra at Berklee.

A very busy freelance clarinetist and saxophone player in the Boston area, Peter Cokkinias performs frequently with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Pops, the Pops Esplanade Orchestra, Boston Ballet, and Boston Lyric Opera, and in shows at Boston’s Colonial,  Shubert, and Wang Theaters as well as the North Shore Theater. He is a founding member of the Boston Saxophone Quartet.

A native of Springfield, Massachusetts, Dr Cokkinias holds degrees from the Hartt School of Music of the University of Hartford (CT), Manhattan School of Music (NY) and the College-Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati (OH).