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.[1]
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.[6]
In 1935, Rubinstein introduced Hurok to singer Marian Anderson,[7][8] who retained Hurok as her manager for the rest of her career.[9] 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,[10] 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.[7][11]
In honor of Hurok's influence on American music, on December 4, 1971, he was awarded the University of Pennsylvania Glee Club Award of Merit.[12] Beginning in 1964, this award was "established to bring a declaration of appreciation to an individual each year that has made a significant contribution to the world of music and helped to create a climate in which our talents may find valid expression."
In 1972, a bomb planted in Hurok's Manhattan office exploded,[11][13] killing employee Iris Kones and injuring several others, including Hurok. While many people believe the bombing had been arranged by the Jewish Defense League, a far-right terrorist organization which opposed the U.S. tours of artists from the Soviet Union,[14] no one was ever convicted of the crime.
Death
In 1974, en route to a meeting with David Rockefeller to discuss a Rudolf Nureyev project,[11] Hurok died of a heart attack. More than two thousand people nearly filled Carnegie Hall for his funeral,[11] where Marian Anderson delivered the final eulogy.[7]
"He didn't have the musical understanding of a scholar or specialist," Russian pianist Alexander Slobodyanik, another Hurok discovery, told me. "But he had a sixth sense for the aura surrounding an artist, the aura of success or the ability to interest an audience. And after all, most people in a concert audience don't have any special education either. Like Hurok, they just have hearts."
^"What Sol Wrought". Time. April 27, 1959. Archived from the original on September 30, 2007. After 35 years of trying, Hurok had finally signed Moscow's famed Bolshoi Ballet for an epochal eight-week U.S. tour, and now he was issuing a frantic order: tell newspapers nothing more about the Bolshoi—not even its repertory. Was Hurok mad? Not at all. As the Bolshoi opened at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House ... he was merely the center of the fiercest ticket crush in recent memory.
^ abcdHarlow Robinson (November 1994). "Sol Hurok: America's dance impresario". Dance Magazine. By bringing Soviet artists to the West and American artists to the USSR from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, Hurok added an important measure of continuity and humanity to the fragile superpower relationship. Even at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the moment at which the world came closest to nuclear war, the Bolshoi Ballet was dancing across the United States under the "S. Hurok Presents" banner. To those opposed to rapprochement with Moscow, however, such as the militant Jewish Defense League, Hurok's presentation of Soviet performers in the United States was a moral outrage. Beginning with picket lines and stinkbombs, the JDL's anti-Hurok campaign climaxed in the terrorist bombing of his offices in early 1972. Hurok was hospitalized for smoke inhalation, and one of his secretaries was killed. Those who knew Hurok well agree that the incident undermined his seemingly indestructible constitution. He died two years later of a massive heart attack on the way to a meeting with David Rockefeller. They were planning to discuss possible financing for a new attraction he was developing with Rudolf Nureyev—"Nureyev and Friends."
^Richard Rosenthal (2000). Chapter One, excerpt: Rookie Cop: Deep Undercover in the Jewish Defense League. Leapfrog Press. ISBN0-9654578-8-5. Before those responsible were aware they had killed a young Jewish woman, one of those in charge of the operation had already made the obligatory call to the media, saying: "This culture destroys millions of Jews. Cultural bridges of friendship will not be built over the bodies of Soviet Jews. NEVER AGAIN!"
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