Harry Grodberg was a Soviet and Russian organist, born in Klaipeda, Lithuania, on January 3, 1929. He moved with his family to Kaunas in 1939. During the war, they were evacuated to Namangan, where he studied violin with a professor from the evacuated Minsk Conservatory. After the war, he attended music school in Vilnius.
Grodberg studied with Alexander Goldenweiser and Alexander Goedicke. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1955, having studied piano and organ, and joined the Moscow Philharmonic that year as a soloist. He gave his first solo organ concert in 1955 and later performed with musicians including Mstislav Rostropovich, Yevgeny Mravinsky and Kirill Kondrashin.
Grodberg became known for his interpretations of Bach, as well as works by Mozart, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Franck, Rheinberger and Saint-Saëns. He also created organ concert series devoted to twentieth-century composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian, Sergei Slonimsky, Alexander Pirumov, Vladimir Nirenburg and Mikael Tariverdiev. He served on the jury of the International Bach Competition in Leipzig and was an honorary member of the Leipzig Bach Society and the Handel Society of Germany.
As deputy chair of the Organ Council at the USSR Ministry of Culture, Grodberg worked to increase the number of functioning organs in the country. An organ made by the Czech firm Rieger-Kloss was installed in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in 1959. In 2013, an organ by the Austrian firm Rieger Orgelbau, built to a specification he had designed, opened at St. Francis Church in his native Klaipeda. He helped establish the Bach Festival in Tver and founded the Bachoservice festival in Kaliningrad.
Grodberg was named People's Artist of the Russian Federation in 1992 and received the Russian State Prize in 2001 for his concert programs at organ-music festivals in Kaliningrad, Novosibirsk and Tver. He was also named an honorary citizen of Tver. He died in Moscow on November 10, 2016, and was buried at Vagankovo Cemetery.