Sol Hurok was the twentieth century’s most famous concert impresario — the man behind the “S. Hurok Presents” billing that carried Marian Anderson, Arthur Rubinstein and a parade of Russian dancers onto American stages. Born in the Russian Empire on April 9, 1888, he emigrated to the United States in 1906 and was naturalised in 1914; he arranged Anderson’s landmark Lincoln Memorial concert in 1939 and, after decades of trying, brought the Bolshoi Ballet to America in 1959. He talked about the box office with the fatalism of a man who had spent fifty years selling tickets: you can advertise, you can beg, you cannot make people show up.