Ken Herman, San Diego Story, 7th June 2015
With newly minted Mainly Mozart Festival Music Director Michael Francis on the podium Saturday (June 6), the first festival orchestra concert of the 2015 season catapulted the packed Balboa Theatre audience into an ebullient mood. A combination of Francis’ bracing tempos, pianist Jon Kimura Parker’s keyboard wizardry, and the orchestra’s ever reliable finesse produced a rewarding musical trifecta.
Although no one would judge a serious novel after reading only the first chapter, I came away with some clear first impressions of the new maestro (I was unable to attend his Mainly Mozart debut in 2014). On the podium Francis proved a busy, detail-oriented conductor, diligently exploiting contrasts and quite unafraid of the extreme ends of the dynamic continuum…
…I was particularly taken with the second movement [of Symphony No. 35 (“Haffner”)], the Allegretto, where he drew soulful sighs from the low strings and a myriad of cleanly outlined colors in the deft fughetta. In his program notes Francis aptly described this movement as a stately dance, and I also heard in it a stately procession wending its way through the Balboa…”
