When he was seven he began piano studies and at 17 travelled to St. Petersburg and managed to gain entrance to the class of Daugover, later moving over to Felix Blumenfeld.
[1] 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.
On 6 November 1931, he conducted that orchestra and the Academy Capella Choir in the world premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich's Third Symphony.
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.
[1] 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.