Florida Orchestra season lineup features world-class talent, a mix of classics and new work

Andrew Meacham,Tampa Bay Times, 22nd September 2016

As a conductor of the Florida Orchestra, Michael Francis spends time on the details. He is the border collie nipping at the herd, the proofreader who preserves accuracy to the text, the timekeeper.

As music director, he revels in the big ideas. Francis, 40, opens the Florida Orchestra’s latest season Sept. 30, and he is always looking for ways to connect his latest inspiration with a concert.

That’s what he was doing in May 2015 while chatting with a friend, mezzo soprano Jamie Barton. Francis was working with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, conducting the world premiere of a work by American composer Jake Heggie.

Heggie has composed nine operas, at least two (Dead Man Walking and Moby-Dick) to worldwide acclaim, and collaborated with the biggest names in opera and Broadway. He had composed the new concerto, The Work at Hand, for Barton, a frequent performer at the Metropolitan Opera and a Grammy nominee. Francis loved the piece and wanted to perform it with the Florida Orchestra.

But how? What else would the orchestra play to make a full concert?

Barton suggested Sea Pictures, by British composer Edward Elgar. That got Francis thinking. The Work at Hand is not literally about the sea — a poem by a woman who was dying of cancer makes up the lyrics — but those lyrics talk about great struggles, of fighting against the boundary of death as explorers once dared to sail off the edge of the earth.

Four Sea Interludes by Benjamin Britten also came to mind, as did La Mer, composed by Claude Debussy on the southern coast of England, 3 miles from Sussex, where Francis grew up.

The result is a Florida Orchestra concert, Songs of the Sea: Britten, Elgar and Debussy (Nov. 11-13), the same weekend as the Blue Ocean Film Festival. Both Barton and cellist Anne Martindale Williams, for whom Heggie also composed The Work at Hand, will perform. The concert’s theme also ties to the audience, Francis said, to “the fact that we are by the sea, to celebrate the fact that Tampa Bay is so surrounded by water.”

Francis will lead the orchestra’s first concert of the season Sept. 30 at the David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts, with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Some of the season’s Masterworks concerts will emphasize French and Russian romanticism, a pairing Francis first encountered while playing with the London Symphony Orchestra.

“I have always felt that the French and Russian connection is palpable, powerful and passionate,” he said. “There’s always been a happy marriage between the two countries in terms of culture.”