Look—down there! It’s Captain America! It’s Iron Man! It’s Thor wielding his hammer! No—it’s FILMharmonique Orchestra conductor Francis Choinière wielding his baton.

Francis and the FILMharmonique Orchestra are set to present the new film concert Marvel Studios’ The Infinity Saga Concert Experience on August 15 and 16 at Montreal’s Place des Arts. The event will feature live orchestral performances of twenty-three musical excerpts, spanning from the earliest Marvel films to the most recent. It promises to be an exciting, emotional journey through a beloved canon of films, with each score brought to life by an 80-piece live orchestra.

Concert films, a growing trend, flip the movie-watching experience on its head by offering audiences a new perspective on familiar favourites—one where the musical score carries the film’s emotional weight, taking precedence over visuals and dialogue.

If your image of a conductor is a hoary, wild-maned figure, you might be surprised by Francis’s youthful, polished appearance. A conductor for over 10 years, Francis studied classical composition with a focus on choral works—an education that opened the door to a collaboration with Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli at Montreal’s Bell Centre. Not long after, he conducted a Harry Potter concert film—an event that changed the course of his career and cemented his passion for performing orchestral works with the broad appeal of blockbuster film scores.

Founded in 2015 by Denis Chabot with the goal of making classical music more accessible to a wider audience, the FILMharmonique Orchestra’s popularity soared when Francis, his brother Nicholas, and their friend Gabriel, partnered with it in 2018 through their music promotion company, GFN Productions. Since then, the orchestra went from doing four to five shows a year pre-COVID to more than 100 today. Films presented in concert have included Harry Potter, Amadeus, Star Wars, The Godfather, Gladiator, Titanic, Fantasia, La Passion d’Augustine, Bugs Bunny, and The Lord of the Rings—all of them hits.

Francis credits the format’s success to the mass appeal of movies. “Movies attract all generations,” he told me in our interview. “That’s the beauty of film music. I grew up with Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, but my dad loved those movies as well, so these film concerts have a wide impact.”

It’s a situation reflected in the concert demographics, which he described as “a cross-section of the population, with about half the audience having never attended a symphonic performance before.” He added, “While it’s true that the medium—movies—has helped attract younger concertgoers, the audience is just more proportional in terms of age than at a typical classical concert. There’s more youth, but really, it’s all generations.”

What is the general reaction of people who have attended one of his concerts for the first time? “A lot of people are surprised by how many artists are behind a film score,” he said. “There can be up to 100 musicians on stage. That’s a huge amount of percussion, brass, and strings. I think people really come to appreciate the artistry that goes into a film score, and why we feel certain emotions during specific scenes. It’s not like watching the movie in your living room, because when a film is mixed, the music is usually very low. But in the concert setting that we do, it’s in the foreground.”

But won’t that garble some of the dialogue? “The movies have subtitles, but people usually don’t come to these concerts to see the movie for the first time. Some have seen it so often they know the dialogue by heart. The point is not to hear it super clearly; it’s to hear the soundtrack.

“And people are surprised when they realize, ‘wow, I didn’t even notice there was music in this part.’ In a score like Lord of the Rings, which is 3½ hours long, there’s maybe 10 or 15 minutes of no music throughout the film.”

If you imagine, as I did, that rehearsing for one of these events with 80 musicians is a long process, you’d be wrong. “Typically, we rehearse two to three times,” Francis said. “We have a very talented pool of musicians that are very used to this kind of repertoire. We also find that everyone is very passionate about it because they don’t get to perform it often. So when they get a chance to perform one of their ‘childhood favourites,’ there’s an extra energy on stage. And we all want to do the material justice.”

Does he have a favourite composer? “I’m one of those people who likes everything,” he said with a chuckle. “Well, I can’t really say everything. But I listen to film music as much as I do classical music. For me, film music is a continuation of the classical tradition. John Williams, Hans Zimmer… they were inspired by the greats, like Stravinsky, Mahler, Holst.

“When it comes to film music,” he continued, “John Williams is probably my top composer—the number of scores, the writing. His music is so complex, original, and thoughtful. Just the way he builds the tension—he really has it down pat.

“I also listen to choir music,” he said. “I’m a big choir music fan, because it was part of my upbringing. I sang in choirs for 13 years, since I was about 6 years old.”

Francis is one of the rare artists—along with conducting and composing, he’s an accomplished pianist—who also manages the business side of things through GFN Productions and the FILMharmonique. How does he find the time to do it all?

“That’s a question everyone wonders,” he said. “I don’t know how I do it, either. I think it’s about those two parts of my brain being equally stimulated. I always had a business mind and a creative one. I think for me it feels like balance.”

He added: “We can’t be creative all the time because after a while it gets harder and draining. Especially as a composer, I can only write music for so many hours in a day before I’ve exhausted my creative energy. When that happens, I turn on my technical brain. I guess I live an endless cycle of just work where I’m just pivoting from one thing to the other.”

When I asked how many hours he sleeps at night, he chuckled before saying: “Still a good eight.” But there’s a catch: “When I get up in the morning, it’s usually straight to work, whether on score studying or answering emails, until I go to bed. It’s pretty much non-stop. In that sense, I don’t have a good work / life balance, but I tell myself it’ll come later.”

Are there movie scores he would refuse to perform? “At the moment, for the most part, I haven’t said no very much on contracts. But everything that we’re programming are projects of interest to me because I have a key role in programming. I pick things that I think are particularly well written and will be well received by the audience.”

When I asked if, as a composer, conductor, pianist, he has a dream project he’d like to fulfill, he paused and peered sideways, then said: “Going back to my composer lifelong dream, it was always to compose a film score, so that’s up there. So to go further down that line, I’d like to create the film score, have it be a huge film, and then get to conduct it as a concert film. That would be full circle.”

Here’s to Francis reaching full circle.

To purchase tickets for The Infinity Saga Concert Experience in Montreal on August 18 and 19, click here.

For more information about GFN Productions’s upcoming concerts and audiophile Classics record label, click here. For information about the FILMharmonique Orchestra, click here.