"FULL SPEED AHEAD WITH CULTURE"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 426, 22 August 1947, Page 20

"FULL SPEED AHEAD WITH CULTURE"

| Remarkable Career of Sol Hurok

HE coming visit to this coun- ) try of the American violinist Isaac Stern, to give a series | of concerts under NZBS auspices, | provides New Zealand with a link | with an American impresario who | | is perhaps the last of his almost leg|endary line. This impresario is Sol |Hurok, by arrangement with whom | Isaac Stern is to make his tour. | : Hurok can. claim to be the only inde- | pendent showman still able to compete | successfully with the big theatrical com- | bines of to-day. Pavlova, Chaliapin, Elman, Gadski, Segovia are just a few of the names which have appeared on the billboards. Though he received little orthodox education and no artistic or musical training, the lack of these was compensated for in him by a‘ happy knack of knowing what the public wants (or can be persuaded to want) and what it will pay its money to come and see. This useful attribute has won for Hurok an office on Fifth Avenue, a well-filled waistcoat, and a bankroll far too large for any wallet to contain. Hardware the Hard Way S, Hurok (as he refers to himself-it is never "I" nor "Solomon,’ nor even "Sol"), was born in Russia-in Pogar, to be precise-about 60 years ago. When he was 15, young Sol asked his father to let him go to near-by Kharkov to learn the hardware business. His father consented, gave him a liberal supply of expenses money, and the boy took his leave, going not to Kharkov, but to America, where he duly arrived, by way of Poland and Germany, with a little over a dollar left in his pocket. Luckily he had relatives in Philadelphia who took him in and suggested a career for him. Sol accepted their suggestion and within a week was out on the road with a peddlar’s basket on his arm. Though there may have been much to recommend his* relatives’ suggestion that this was the best way for him to learn something about this strange country ahd to ~}master the everyday language of the people, the boy soon decided he was made for other things. Exactly what they were he was not sure, but he determined to find out. His determination led him into, and out of, 15 jobs in less than a year, the 15th proving no closer to his heart’s desire than the first. He attributed this partly to the fact that he. was too far removed from the centre of. things, a state of affairs which he pro-_ ceeded to remedy by moving to New York and taking a job as a clerk in a hardware store (the hardware business may have been in his blood-it was his father’s occupation). Here he remained for a while, saving his earnings and paying occasional visits to the opera. Down Byt Soon Up Then abruptly, having saved what he considered to be a large. enough sum (not much over £30) he rented a dance hall and persuaded the violinist Zimbalist to play there for the "culture-starved

proletariat." S. Hurok sold tickets himself, made more than £300, and then, in his own words, "got going full speed ahead in the culture line." By 1923 he was making about 40,000 dollars a year: by 1925 he was bankrupt. He had gambled on one of his less fortunate ventures rather too heavily. But undismayed, he was soon at it again, and to-day he is back at the top. "Audiences don’t care what S. Hurok presents," the said modestly. "They know whatever S. Hurok presents is hokay."