Interview: GFN Productions: French composers in the spotlight, April 9

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GFN Productions continue to unfold their agenda. Several concerts are scheduled for March and April, starting with a tour by Trio Lyrico with Francis Choinière on piano. The three tenors Marco Bocchicchio, Sam Champagne and Matthew Adam made a stop in Quebec City (February 26) before continuing on to Sorel-Tracy (March 3) and Gatineau (March 5). On March 18, their tour ends in Montreal, at the Maison symphonique. A “dream evening” and a highlight of the season for GFN. Francis Choinière will be back in his usual conductor’s garb and will lead the 50 musicians of the FILMharmonic Orchestra, of which he is also the co-artistic director, in a repertoire of Neapolitan songs and Broadway classics. On April 9, he will again conduct the orchestra in Berlioz’s Symphonique fantastique and Ravel’s Bolero, alongside other memorable screen works: Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, popularized by Disney’s Fantasia (1940), and excerpts from the Harry Potter saga composed by Frenchman Alexandre Desplat.

“I have great admiration for film composers, especially those who explore more orchestral colours. It’s a really good thing to combine this kind of classical sound in a large orchestra and it’s something that brings today’s audience closer to classical music,” says Choinière.

The conductor’s career path

This young ambitious conductor has already worked on the preparation of the choirs for a show at the Bell Centre featuring the music of Hans Zimmer, in the presence of the composer himself. Other high-profile concerts have forged his conducting experience such as with Sarah Brightman in 2019, Andrea Bocelli in 2018 and even a few years before. “These are events that had a very good impact and came very early in my career which is still young. I was only 19 years old when I was the choir director for Game of Thrones Live, under the direction of Ramin Djawadi.”

Choinière is grateful for the trust placed in him, especially by Jean-Sébastien Vallée, director of choral studies at McGill University, who praised his musicality, his professionalism, and helped him get such opportunities. After that, it’s all a matter of seizing the day.

From project to project, Francis Choinière’s career is growing and, in the process, ensuring the continuity of GFN Productions. Co-founded by Gabriel Felcarek-Hope, Francis and his brother Nicolas Choinière, the company continues to grow. Like its April 9 concert, it offers ambitious programs at the crossroads between classical music, pop music and the seventh art. “It’s long hours of work. Being in production and musical direction at the same time is quite an involvement that takes time and energy. It’s really the experience I had with the Orchestre philharmonique et choeur des mélomanes (OPCM) that helped me build the tools to continue. When I started GFN Productions, I had already taken my first steps in this field. Now it’s become something a little more regular where we do several large productions a year.”

On being a conductor

“It’s one thing to be an assistant; in my case, with the McGill Symphony Orchestra and at the National Arts Centre,” said Choinière. Being able to observe rehearsals with an orchestra, watching, for example, how Yannick Nézet-Séguin works, is a great learning experience. Afterwards, it is up to each conductor to build his own personality, his own tools for working in rehearsals, how to manage the musicians, how to manage the music. To manage his time too. Nothing is improvised.”

If Choinière is not a conductor like the others, it is also because of his musical background and his particular approach to the works he conducts: “I like to be part of the process of joining all the elements of the music together, of conveying the composer’s message. One way to do this is through the body, feeling the music and communicating it to the musicians to build a unified vision of the work. I am a composer myself and I often ask myself, if I were in the creator’s shoes, what I would like to hear in the score. In college, I had learned a lot about orchestration, about instrumental registers and colours in my training as a composer. That gave me a good advantage.”