Carl von Garaguly |

Carl von Garagüly

In April 1943, the premiere of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony took place in the Swedish city of Gothenburg. In the days when the war was still in full swing, and Sweden was surrounded by a ring of Nazi troops, this act acquired a symbolic meaning: Swedish musicians and listeners thus expressed their sympathy for the courageous Soviet people. “Today is the first performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in Scandinavia. This is a tribute to admiration for the Russian people and their heroic struggle, the heroic defense of their homeland, ”the summary of the concert program read.

One of the initiators and conductor of this concert was Karl Garaguli. He was then already over forty years old, but the conductor’s career as an artist was just beginning. A Hungarian by birth, a graduate of the National Academy of Music in Budapest, he studied with E. Hubay, Garaguli performed as a violinist for a long time, worked in orchestras. In 1923, he came on tour to Sweden and since then has become so strongly associated with Scandinavia that today few people remember his origins. For almost fifteen years, Garaguli was the concertmaster of the best orchestras in Gothenburg and Stockholm, but only in 1940 he first took up the conductor’s stand. It turned out so well that he was immediately appointed the third conductor of the Stockholm Orchestra, and two years later – the leader.

The wide concert activity of Garaguli takes place in the post-war years. He leads the symphony orchestras in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, tours in most European countries. In 1955.

Garaguli visited the USSR for the first time, performing with various programs, including works by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz and other authors. “Karl Garaguli masters the orchestra to perfection,” wrote the Sovietskaya Kultura newspaper, “and thanks to the impeccable precision of the conductor’s gesture, he achieves exceptional expressiveness and subtle nuances of sound.”

A significant part of Garaguli’s repertoire consists of works by Scandinavian composers – J. Svensen, K. Nielsen, Z. Grieg, J. Halvorsen, J. Sibelius, as well as contemporary authors. Many of them, thanks to this artist, became known outside of Scandinavia.

L. Grigoriev, J. Platek, 1969