François Evans is a classically-trained film composer and music producer. He recently completed work on the chilling, surreal score for American director Cradeaux Alexander’s horror-thriller feature: Inherit the Witch. He has written the soundtracks to Edgar Wright’s first feature A Fistful of Fingers, Josh Collins’s cult adventure Pervirella, Shaun Mosley’s biblical drama The 3 Kings (featuring Ron Moody & Vanessa Redgrave), Roberto Roarke’s thriller Hitman and Darren Ward’s dark horror-thriller Sudden Fury. He composed the score for Stefan Archetti’s colourful Italian children’s movie Il fungo sirena (The Mermaid Mushroom) winning the ‘Special Mention Award’ at the 2011 Granada Film Festival.
He specializes in combining orchestra and electronics with surreal sound transformations.
François Evans conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, London, 2008
Evans’s entry into film scoring was forged by the early scores of John Barry and Jerry Goldsmith, and those of Ennio Morricone, Lalo Schifrin, Elisabeth Lutyens and John Corigliano.
Biography
François Evans cut his teeth on fourteen short films for the London International Film School, the National Film & Television School and the Fondation Européenne pour la maîtrise de l’image et du son (FÉMIS) in Paris. His scores include 29 Days in February starring Jim Broadbent and Lysette Anthony, Simon Hunter’s Click and John Dower’s The Secret Songs of Butterfish, which won the Gold Plaque Award at the Chicago Film Festival and was shortlisted for best soundtrack at the San Francisco Golden Reels Film Soundtrack Awards.
His first concept album of pop ballads: The Lunatic, the Lover & the Poet with lyrics by John Porter, under the duo name: After Magritte is currently streaming and had been described as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream for synthesizers.” (Mastodon).
In 2014 François performed on ondes Martenot at the Glastonbury Festival in a concert of film music by 1960s’ Thunderbirds composer Barry Gray, conducted by Charles Hazlewood and members of the bands Portishead and Goldfrapp. He had already multi-tracked all three ondes Martenot parts for the first, complete stereo re-recording of Maurice Jarre’s score for David Lean’s 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, with the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.
François Evans at the ondes Martenot, Colston Hall, Bristol, 2015
In 2008 he co-produced and conducted the 81-piece Philharmonia Orchestra with live electronics for the Barry Gray Centenary Concert of film music at London’s Royal Festival Hall, in aid of the Cinema & Television Benevolent Fund.
In 1999, François arranged music for the wedding of David & Victoria Beckham.
During the 1990s he was Associate Conductor of the London Gay Symphony Orchestra, conducting charity concerts, including the world première of Wilfred Josephs’s Violin Concerto (soloist Michael Davis) and the European public première of Josephs’s poignant Mortales, for 216 musicians.
François Evans is a former voting member of BAFTA, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the UK Music Producers’ Guild and the Royal Society of Musicians.
François Evans studied ondes Martenot playing under Pascale Rousse-Lacordaire at the Conservatoire de musique, Boulogne Billancourt in Paris. – Rousse-Lacordaire was a pupil of Maurice Martenot and Jeanne Loriod. He inherited a modèle 6 (valve) instrument from the family of the late British film & TV composer Barry Gray, and occasionally uses this unique instrument in his film scoring.
In 1992 he assisted British composer Jonathan Harvey in the realization of the electronic part for his opera Inquest of Love, commissioned by English National Opera.
Winning a scholarship from the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust, Evans studied for a year at IRCAM in Paris under Tristan Murail and other notable contemporary composers including Kaija Saariaho. There he learned spectral techniques for combining electronics with orchestral instruments, which he uses to bring a unique, otherworldly dimension to film music.
Following childhood experience singing with the chorus at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Evans trained in harmony and counterpoint at the Watford School of Music. He read Music at the University of Ulster (‘first’ in composition under David Morris) tutored in piano under Donald Cullington and percussion with David Openshaw (principal timpanist of the Ulster orchestra). Evans attended music summer schools in Ennis, Ireland (under John Buckley), Dartington in Devon as apprentice to British film composer Wilfred Josephs and at Goldsmiths’ College, London for film music under Los Angeles-based composer Don Ray. Evans gained a PhD in electroacoustic composition at City University of London under Prof. Simon Emmerson, with composition tutorials from Simon Holt and Prof. Robert Saxton at the Guildhall School of Music.
In the 1970s he was a child actor at ATV studios, Elstree, England, appearing in The Ballad of Salomon Pavey and Come Back Lucy.
