Sol Hurok
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Sol Hurok

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Sol Hurok

Sol Hurok (also Solomon Israilevich Hurok; born Solomon Izrailevich Gurkov, Russian Соломон Израилевич Гурков; April 9, 1888 – March 5, 1974) was a 20th-century American impresario.

Hurok was born in Pogar, Chernigov Governorate, Russian Empire (in present-day Bryansk Oblast, Russia) in 1888. His father, Israel Hurok, was a hardware merchant. At age 17, he was sent to Kharkiv to learn the trade. Shortly thereafter, in 1906, he immigrated to the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1914.

During Hurok's long career, S. Hurok Presents managed many performing artists, including Jules Bledsoe, Marian Anderson, Irina Arkhipova, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Grace Bumbry, Feodor Chaliapin, Nestor Mesta Chayres, Van Cliburn, Victoria de los Ángeles, Manuela del Río, Isadora Duncan, Katherine Dunham, Michel Fokine, Margot Fonteyn, Emil Gilels, Alexander Glazunov, Horacio Gutiérrez, Daniel Heifetz, Jerome Hines, Isa Kremer, Moura Lympany, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, David Oistrakh, Anna Pavlova, Jan Peerce, Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich, Arthur Rubinstein, Andrés Segovia, Isaac Stern, Galina Vishnevskaya, Regine, Ralph Votapek, Efrem Zimbalist, Mariemma and many others.

In the early 1920s, opportunities for Black singers, especially Black male singers, were nearly non-existent on the concert or operatic stage. Most of the few who found any success did so by traveling to Europe to establish a professional career. Jules Bledsoe was an exception: he was able to sign with Hurok. With Hurok's sponsorship, Bledsoe made his professional singing debut in New York's Aeolian Hall on Easter Sunday, April 20, 1924.

In 1935, Rubinstein introduced Hurok to singer Marian Anderson, who retained Hurok as her manager for the rest of her career. A few years later, with Walter White of the NAACP and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Hurok was instrumental in persuading U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes to arrange Anderson's Easter Sunday open-air concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on April 9, 1939.

Beginning in the late 1930s Hurok managed Colonel W. de Basil's Original Ballet Russe, as well as its offshoot rival company, Sergei J. Denham's The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. They often performed near each other, and Hurok hoped to reunite the companies,[citation needed] but ultimately was unsuccessful.

In 1959, after 35 years of effort, Sol Hurok brought the Soviet Bolshoi Ballet to the United States for an eight-week performance tour. In 1961, he brought the Kirov Academy of Ballet and the Igor Moiseyev Ballet Company to the U.S. In 1962, he again brought the Bolshoi to the U.S. for a tour at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The First Moog Quartet, the first to perform electronic music in Carnegie Hall, was formed in 1970 in response to Hurok's request to hear the Moog synthesizer in a live concert.

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