Master Class: What does an orchestra conductor do?

Andrew Meacham, Tampa Bay Times, 8th March 2017

The young man lifted his hands, one of which held a baton, and brought them down.

A grand piano took off like a racehorse hit with a whip, the pianist slamming chords in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, better known as the Pathétique. It and Jeancarlo Gonzalez, a graduate conducting student at the University of South Florida School of Music, had gotten this far together several times.

A few seconds in, Michael Francis stopped the performance again. The Florida Orchestra’s music director was giving a class to a half-dozen of Gonzalez’s classmates, most of whom were pursuing master’s degrees at USF. Francis, 40, walked across the stage of a rehearsal hall and asked Gonzalez a question.

“What do you think the composer was feeling?”

There are things in every college budget a student does not need. New textbooks, for example. For aspiring conductors, on-the-spot tutoring by someone of Francis’ expertise and visibility is one of those benefits without a price tag.