Chuck Lavazzi, KDHX, 25th November 2018
“It has been a few years since my wife and I have been to London, but I feel like we took another visit there Friday night (November 23) with that wonderfully evocative performance of Vaughan Williams’s “A London Symphony” by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra under the baton […]
Sarah Bryan Miller, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 24th November 2018
“Francis made a masterful case for [Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 2, “A London Symphony,”], aided by the orchestra.”
Andrew Meacham, Tampa Bay Times, 9th November 2018
“[T]he Florida Orchestra and the Florida Holocaust Museum collaborate to remember Kristallnacht, the ‘night of broken glass,’ and uplift its victims. This weekend’s concert series, A Child of Our Time, opened Friday at the David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts. British composer Michael Tippett, […]
Timothy Robson, Cleveland Classical, 8th August 2018
“The Cleveland Orchestra played a concise and musically satisfying program of works by three Czech composers: Smetana, Janáček, and Dvořák. British conductor Michael Francis led the stylish performance…
[Šárka: The Warrior Woman, the third movement of Smetana’s symphonic cycle Má Vlast (“My Homeland”)] and throughout the concert, Francis drew […]
Mark Satola, The Plain Dealer, 6th August 2018
“Guest conductor Michael Francis, music director of the Tampa Bay-based Florida Orchestra since 2015, delivered electrifying performances of Smetana’s “Sarka,” Janacek’s “Taras Bulba,” and the dramatic Symphony No. 7 in D minor by Dvorak, to a medium-sized audience. Those who didn’t attend missed one of the most […]
Ken Herman, San Diego Story, 18th June 2018
“…the evening’s award for most audacious ensemble work came from 15 members of the orchestra who gave a vibrant account of Igor Stravinsky’s sparkling, neoclasical “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto from 1938…Francis had the Mainly Mozart players stand for their performance, which added to their athletic but supremely refined […]
Christian Hertzog, San Diego Union-Tribune, 17th June 2018
“Festival director Michael Francis led 15 musicians in a crackling performance. Many groups play the outer movements of “Dumbarton Oaks” under tempo, but Francis matched the speeds of Stravinsky’s own recordings…All 10 string players marvelously dug into their parts, playing with bite or sweetness as appropriate, slamming […]
Ken Herman, San Diego Story, 11th June 2018
“For Sergei’s Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” the program opener, the additional strings from the Youth Orchestra gave the Festival Orchestra an unusually lush, satiny sonority that could not have been better suited to the composer’s effulgent style: urgent, dramatic surges capped with dreamy themes. Francis certainly appeared delighted to […]
Ken Herman, San Diego Story, 10th June 2018
“Michael Francis opened the 30th installment of San Diego’s annual Mainly Mozart Festival Saturday with an ebullient orchestra concert that brought back the excitement of the festival’s heady beginnings under David Atherton.”
“Even if festival Music Director Francis had not titled this concert “Rebel with a Cause,” the […]
Christian Hertzog, San Diego Union-Tribune, 10th June 2018
“At the Balboa Theater on Saturday evening, Mainly Mozart director Michael Francis brought down his baton to unleash a grinding orchestral dissonance that sounded as if it had time-traveled from 1950s Darmstadt back to early 18th-century Paris.”
“…the all-star orchestra followed Francis with delicious precision.”
“This was an exciting […]
