Russian conductor with many strings to his bow
He led the precursor to HK Phil and spent three decades in medicine
1916-2014
Few could have achieved what Renaissance man Dr Solomon Bard did in a lifetime.
Bard - doctor, conductor, archaeologist, author - died peacefully in a Sydney hospital on November 7 at the age of 98.
Born in 1916 in the town of Chita, Siberia, which was then part of Tsarist Russia, Bard and his family emigrated to China in 1924, settling in the northeastern city of Harbin , Heilongjiang province, which was then the biggest Russian enclave outside the Soviet Union.
There, he was exposed to music early on, studying violin with his uncle. He soon joined the Harbin Symphony Orchestra.
But life changed in 1931 when Japan invaded the northeast, known as Manchuria, during the Mukden Incident. His parents moved to Argentina, while the 15-year-old Bard and his brother went to Shanghai, where he sat an entrance exam for the University of Hong Kong. He began a medicine degree at HKU in 1934 and graduated in 1939.
But soon after, he was to encounter the Japanese army again. Bard said when Japan invaded Hong Kong in 1941, it led to "the most humiliating time of my life".