The American-born conductor, pianist, vocal coach and music educator Dobbs Franks has died. He was 90.

Dobbs Franks, Tokyo, 2010

Born in 1933 in Arkansas, Franks had his first piano lesson at the age of three. Seventeen years later he earned his Masters in Piano at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City.

The year after graduating from Juilliard he toured for Columbia Artists as the pianist in a piano trio which performed in 49 of the 50 states of the USA over the next two years.

Franks conducted the first US tour of the musical West Side Story, and its Australian premiere season opening on 29 October 1960 at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre. He then conducted its Canadian premiere in 1961 in Toronto. In total, Franks conducted over 1000 performances of the show (he also directed the show’s Australian revival in 1983).

Franks became the Artistic and Musical Director of the New Zealand Opera Company in the mid-1960s, where he met his future wife, the English violinist Ruth Pearl, then the company’s Concertmaster.

In 1969, Pearl and Dobbs, as concertmaster and conductor, were engaged to form the Elizabethan Melbourne Orchestra (now