John Franceschina
Candida, Incidental Music for String Quartet was commissioned in 1985 by director Neal Kenyon for his production of George Bernard Shaw’s nineteenth-century comedy Candida at the Richard G. Fallon Theatre in Tallahassee, Florida, during the 1985-1986 theatre season. To sustain the atmosphere of a nineteenth-century conservative society, the director asked for a suite of musical compositions performed by a string quartet and composed in an old-fashioned musical idiom with easily digestible melodies and harmonies. While the impetus to break away from traditional societal norms in the play is evoked in the music by an occasional unconventional harmonic or melodic novelty that is more forward looking than the typical romantic salon music of the period, the suite, in essence, remains conservative and unpretentious in its construction.John Franceschina, composer, has created scores for the National Shakespeare Company and the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Baltimore’s Center Stage, Washington’s Ford’s Theatre and the Arena Stage, the Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Cleveland Playhouse, Florida Studio Theatre, Geva Theatre, Syracuse Stage, Papermill Playhouse, Music Theatre Works, and the Moscow Art Theatre, in addition to the Asolo State Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, where he acted as composer-in-residence from 1976 to 1993. His Fanfare for the Fiftieth was commissioned by Philippe Entremont for the fiftieth anniversary of the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra in 1985; his secular oratorio, Houtebeen, for male chorus, string orchestra and accordion ensemble, toured the Netherlands in 2014, and his opera, Scenes from the Jungle toured the Netherlands in 2019.
