| Biography | Mark Hambourg was a Russian-British concert pianist.
The family moved to London in 1889, as refugees from the Tsarist regime. There, having been heard by Paderewski, Mark made a debut at the old Princes Hall in 1890. This was a success, and there was another concert there, and a tour of the provinces. The family was too poor to turn down these opportunities, though they would gladly have protected the boy from public life. As a child he was billed as Max Hambourg. He was invited into the circle of the painter Felix Moscheles (son of the pianist Ignaz Moscheles), in London, where he often met Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Ellen Terry and others. In 1890 Shaw, hearing him play, felt that the Lyric Theatre was merely exploiting children, but late in 1891 he was admiring his performance of Bach at the Steinway Hall and wrote that, with suitable training, "this Russian lad might astonish the world some day." |