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Samuel Franko is one of early music's most ardent advocates of whom you've never heard.
Born in 1857 to emigrant parents, he and his family quit New Orleans for their German homeland in the early 1860s, roiled by the Civil War. While abroad, he and his brother Nahan, both prodigiously gifted string players, schooled with the Continent's finest, including Joseph Joachim and Henri Vieuxtemps.
After the family returned stateside at the end of the decade, Samuel and his brother found great success. Nahan would become concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, and Samuel-"who for some secret reason prefers to be known as 'Sam,' " sniffed The New York Times--joined the New York Philharmonic as principal violist.
Despairing, however, of a widespread bias that judged American musicians as inherently less gifted than their European colleagues, he quit the Establishment for a more varied existence.
Throughout the 1890s in N ew York, Sam was everywhere. He gave recitals with his musical sisters, Jeanne, Rachel, and Selma; he was an impresario, arranging a distinguished series of chamber music performances at the Aschenbroedel Verein, a social organization for German-American orchestral musicians; he appeared as violin soloist and arranged and composed music-his cadenzas for the Mozart violin concertos are still played today.
In 1894, he founded his own orchestra, the American Symphony Orchestra, with only American musicians, and he led his band in mainstream compositions-plenty of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert-and also explored byways that others ignored. (Don't confuse this ensemble with the American Symphony Orchestra founded in 1962 by Leopold Stokowski and currently' led by Leon Botstein, though their missions, in part, overlap.)
In 1901, Franko inaugurated a series devoted to Baroque and earlier-Classical music-Concerts of Old Music-and it was a hit. The New York Times wrote: "These concerts have enabled us to hear the old masters' works performed in the spirit in which they were conceived."
Franko had found a niche. The Times praised him as the "musical Schliemann" (a reference to archeologist Heinrich Schliemann,...