Lajos Shuk BPO Music Director: 1935-36 source: BPO program book - 5 November 1936, page 3         The brilliant young Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra Society was born of a prominent musical family in Budapest, Hungary. His home has always been recognized as a musical center, being visited by the finest musicians in Europe, some of whom participated in the string quartets and other musical activities which were always in evidence in his home. Growing up with this musical background it was no wonder that he had absolute pitch at the age of five. He started to study the violincello when eleven and appeared for the first time in public when thirteen years old. His masters on the violincello were the famous cellist, David Popper and Hugo Becker. He made his debut in Berlin, later touring Europe, appearing in forty large cities and being decorated at several royal courts. He has been proclaimed a master of violincello by music critics in Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Constantinople, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and many other places where he has appeared.         In 1920 he was brought to America by the Lentz quartet, on the strength of his phenomenal success abroad, and toured this country. He has been soloist with many symphony orchestras and in chamber music concerts under such sponsorship as Mrs. Elizabeth Symphony. Coolidge, the International Composers Guild, the League of Composers and the Beethoven association. He has played with such masters as Bartok, Casals, Dohnanyi, Casella, Goossens, Hertz, Hofmann, Muzio, Rodzinski, and many others.         On the firm musical foundation thus established by Mr. Shuk, through his music, he returned to Europe in 1932, knowledge (sic) of the 'cello and symphony studied conducting with such masters as Felix Weingartner, Bruno Walter, and others. After conducting in Switzerland, Austria and Hungary he was appointed leader of the fifty-year-old Philharmonic Orchestra in Arad, Rumania, which he revived with increasing attendance and success. In 1934 he returned to America, was immediately called upon to lead a symphony orchestra in New York City in a nationwide broadcast and before an outdoor audience of 25,000 people, in Central Park. He then was immediately engaged for Buffalo as the director of the then Emergency Relief Bureau Orchestra.         He organized the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and gave for two years many extremely successful concerts, among them one in place of the Cleveland Orchestra, and several nationwide broadcasts. He left Buffalo this spring to conduct the New York Civic, New York Festival, Brooklyn Symphony, Bridgeport Symphony, Gotham Little Symphony and the Naumberg Symphony orchestras with an average attendance of five thousand (?sic) and many flattering press notices; he also received an invitation to conduct four concerts of the Washington, D.C. National Symphony. Recently he was engaged by the Hippodrome Opera Company to direct the performance of Humperdinck's "H„nsel and Gretel" at the Hippodrome in New York City. This is his third season in Buffalo.