Look up raconteur in the dictionary, and you just may find a picture of Michael Francis staring at you.
Francis, music director of The Florida Orchestra, is a charming Englishman whose posh accent only serves to highlight a playful public-speaking style when holding forth on an evening’s music program or other musical matters.
His enthusiasm for schooling audiences on program highlights comes leavened with humor, and one can imagine his boardroom keepers’ satisfied smiles at such examples of his personal touch.
Before landing in the Tampa Bay area — with his Lutz-native missus, Cindy — Francis already had established a reputation as a musical comer, with a string of successful conducting gigs in Europe after segueing from a lustrous playing career. Daughter Annabella, now 10, was born shortly after the couple’s arrival in the U.S., and in 2019 Francis became a naturalized citizen.
The maestro is currently in the home stretch of his 10th well-received TFO season. Last year, he signed the latest of a pair of contract extensions, committing him to TFO through the 2029-30 season.
“It’s great to be able to enjoy such long friendships and long relationships – not just with the orchestra but also with the staff and board members,” Francis enthused in a recent phone chat. “And it’s very exciting to be building an orchestra and trying to ensure that the orchestra is not only here for years to come but also thriving, even as Tampa Bay has been going through its own remarkable transformation.”
As for the current season, he mused that it featured some “milestone concerts” for the orchestra, including the March performances of Janáček’s challenging tour de force, “Taras Bulba,” and February’s epic collaboration with the Master Chorale of Tampa Bay on Walton’s “Belshazzar’s Feast.”
“Those kinds of things can be very, very rewarding,” Francis said. “But the key thing for the conductor is that we are not the most important person in that gloriously transformative performance experience. It’s all about the audience.”
Which is why he has such a passion for “communicating the deep truths of the orchestra (so) an intellectual understanding can enable the emotional response,” he added.
Over time, a conductor’s success is measured by any number of subjective criteria: Do their orchestras play well? Do they get along with players, bosses and the public? Are top principles and other players recruited to improve the orchestra? Does the maestro attract first-rate guest soloists?
Francis would seem to rate very good to excellent in all such categories. Even his “stick work” appears crisp and on the mark, with good eye contact with orchestra members.
Francis has had several enviable recording opportunities over the years, and the results have been quite solid. One of the latest — of the Mahler-reorchestrated version of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 — has drawn positive notices, and I’d personally have to call it revelatory.
He’s also recorded more than a half-dozen other albums with various ensembles, though none yet with TFO, whose 2012 Delius album predates him. (Notably, the economics of music recording have been in decline in recent years.)
Francis, 49, had an annual salary of $335,210 in 2022, according to the latest available financial-disclosure document. His predecessor, Stefan Sanderling, was paid $256,486 before he left mid-contract in 2012, when his relationship with management hit the skids.
Francis came aboard as TFO music director for the 2015-16 season with a three-year contract, which was followed by an initial contract extension through 2025.
Busy, busy…
The TFO music director’s other conducting gigs include serving as music director of the Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego and as chief conductor of Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz in Germany. He’s also enjoyed regular guest-conducting performances with the LSO and other top orchestras.
Yet Francis insists his work in Tampa Bay is easily as gratifying as anything else he has done to date.
“This is one of the best-prepared orchestras in the world,” he said. “We work hard, we prepare hard, and we have a lot of fun.”
A onetime double bassist with the LSO, Francis’ first big conducting break came with that same orchestra in 2007, when he was asked, on short notice, to sub for the famous Russian conductor, Valery Gergiev. Soon afterwards, Francis replaced composer/conductor John Adams in a program featuring some Adams pieces, and his podium career was off and running.
At TFO, there hasn’t been much not to love about Francis’ first decade. I’d confess just one teensy personal doubt: I’m ambivalent about the “mystery pieces” the maestro inserts into Masterworks programs — short works not revealed prior to the concert. They are always performed marvelously but sometimes make for a tough fit with the rest of the program, either timewise or otherwise.
One of last season’s mystery pieces — preceding intermission ahead of a 70-minute Mahler symphony — was the final chorale scene from Francis Poulenc’s 1957 opera, “Dialogues des Carmélites,” about the beheading of 16 French nuns. Surprise!
“Well, that was a bummer,” one patron was heard to mutter afterwards. It may have boosted business at the lobby bar, however.
