Gauk's first conducting experience was in 1912 with a student orchestra, and professionally on 1 October 1917 for a production of
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's
Cherevichki at the Petrograd Musical Drama Theatre. He spent much of the 1920s as conductor for the
Mariinsky Ballet. He married the ballerina Elena Gerdt. From 1930 to 1934, he was chief conductor of the
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. On 6 November 1931, he conducted that orchestra and the Academy Capella Choir in the world premiere of
Dmitri Shostakovich's
Third Symphony. From 1932 he worked in Moscow and became chief conductor of a new radio orchestra in 1936, which evolved into the
USSR State Symphony Orchestra. During the Second World War, after escaping from Riga, he taught in Moscow, before spending two years at the
Tbilisi Conservatory and reviving the Georgian State Symphony Orchestra. He helped to reconstruct
Sergei Rachmaninoff's
First Symphony from the orchestral parts found in the archives of the
Moscow Conservatory in 1944; the manuscript score was lost in the 1920s. He conducted the world premiere of
Aram Khachaturian's
Cello Concerto in Moscow in 1946. Gauk's own compositions include a symphony, chamber works for strings and works for piano. He left an unfinished autobiography. His discography is now only partly available;
Brilliant Classics released two box sets (Vol. 1, 2008; Vol. 2, 2010) with recordings taken from broadcasts of works by Russian and other composers. His most notable students were
Eduard Grikurov,
Yevgeny Mravinsky,
Ilya Musin, and
Yevgeny Svetlanov. == References ==