NYT: Gilbert E. Kaplan, Publisher and Improbable Conductor, Dies at 74

[Frank Forman]

I am much appreciative of his recordings. He brings out elements that are
usually buried. But I could not detect much in the way of personality. Not
at all in the league of Mengelberg and Scherchen, who have personality by
the ton and all of it sensibly in tune with the music. I find Rattle
arbitrary in his idiosyncracies.

I find most conductors bland and do not really know how Kaplan stands up
next to them.

Gilbert E. Kaplan, Publisher and Improbable Conductor, Dies at 74
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/arts/music/gilbert-e-kaplan-publisher-and-improbable-conductor-dies-at-74.html

By MARGALIT FOX

Gilbert E. Kaplan, a financial publisher who had an accidental
second career as an international symphony conductor--despite the
fact that he could scarcely read music and possessed a concert
repertoire of exactly one piece--died on New Year's Day in
Manhattan. He was 74.

The cause was cancer, his daughter Emily Kaplan said.

Originally trained as an economist, Mr. Kaplan was the founder and
longtime chief executive of Institutional Investor, a monthly
magazine for pension fund and asset managers. After starting the
publication in 1967, at 26, he built it into a multimedia concern
comprising magazines, journals, conferences and other services. He
sold the company in 1984 for a figure reported to exceed $70
million.

By then, Mr. Kaplan had embarked on his unlikely vocation as a
globe-trotting conductor of Mahler's Second Symphony--and only
Mahler's Second Symphony. That work, which had held him in thrall
for years, would propel him onto the podiums of some of the world's
leading orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic, the London
Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony and,
in an outing that became the subject of a headline-making fracas,
the New York Philharmonic.

For an untrained conductor to lead a symphony orchestra--much less
to lead one in a fiendish piece like Mahler's Second--is, as The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote in a 1991 review of one of Mr.
Kaplan's concerts, "almost preposterous."

But in that "almost" hung a tale of obsession, determination and
midlife renewal that became, as The New York Times described it in
2003, "one of the strangest acts of wish fulfillment in musical
history."

Mahler's Second, known as the "Resurrection" Symphony, is a work of
titanic power. The piece, which had its world premiere in Berlin in
1895, entails an orchestra of more than 100, a vast choir, choral
soloists, multiple harps, a pipe organ and additional offstage
percussion and brass. Its five movements span some 90 minutes and
have been said to evoke the most elemental aspects of human
experience--joy and sorrow, birth and death--and, ultimately,
resurrection.

Mahler's Second Symphony

Gilbert E. Kaplan conducted Mahler's Second, known as the
"Resurrection" Symphony, more than 100 times.

IFRAME:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/qM0vlnSxMZ8?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0

YouTube: Canal de Josep489

By 1982, when Mr. Kaplan made his sweaty-palmed debut with the
American Symphony Orchestra, he had undergone an immersion worthy of
George Plimpton, devouring recordings, traveling the world to hear
every live performance, grilling scholars and conductors and
undergoing a monthlong nine-hour-a-day boot camp in the mechanics of
conducting.

Mr. Kaplan would go on to conduct the "Resurrection" more than 100
times. He would become a recognized authority on the piece and the
owner of its original score, which he published in facsimile; a
lecturer on Mahler; and the owner of a bust of him by Rodin.

As a conductor, Mr. Kaplan divided reviewers. Some called his
performances lackluster and superficial, if well intentioned.

But in the end, as unlikely as it seemed, he also wound up with a
sheaf of rapturous notices and--more unlikely still--a
top-selling, critically esteemed recording of the symphony that had
possessed him since he was a young man.

The son of a shirt manufacturer, Gilbert Edmund Kaplan was born in
Manhattan on March 3, 1941, and reared in Lawrence, on Long Island.
His family, he said, was for the most part unmusical: As a boy,
Gilbert endured three years of piano lessons and played the guitar a
little. (His older brother, under the professional name Joseph
Brooks, became a songwriter whose hits included "You Light Up My
Life.")

After attending Duke University, he earned a bachelor's degree from
the New School for Social Research in New York and studied at New
York University Law School. In 1963, he took a $15,000-a-year job as
an economist with the American Stock Exchange.

He soon became conscious of the importance of money managers in
financial markets--and of a gap in the marketplace when it came to
meeting their needs.

"They were professional investors," Mr. Kaplan told The Sunday Times
of London in 1984. "Here was a group of people who had no
information about their field--and an audience that advertisers
wanted to reach in a major way."

Scraping together $150,000--two-thirds of it borrowed from Gerald
Bronfman, whose family owned the Seagram distilling company--he
put out the first issue of The Institutional Investor, as it was
originally known, in March 1967.

Mr. Kaplan, who also held the title of editor in chief, appointed
the financial journalist George J.-W. Goodman, better known by the
pseudonym Adam Smith, as the magazine's inaugural editor. After
selling the company in 1984 to Capital Cities Communications, he
stayed on until 1992 as Institutional Investor's editor in chief.

The "Resurrection" had put its hold on Mr. Kaplan in 1965, when he
attended a performance of the piece by the American Symphony, under
Leopold Stokowski, at Carnegie Hall.

"I wanted to get inside the music," he told The Age, a Melbourne,
Australia, newspaper, in 1993. "There's a real explanation of life
and death in that music, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it."

But to get fully inside the music, he came to realize, he would have
to learn to conduct it. That he had long since forgotten his scant
musical instruction was no impediment.

"Someone once told me that a bumblebee, judged by aerodynamic
principles, is incapable of flying," Mr. Kaplan told The Associated
Press in 1988. "But the bumblebee doesn't know that. So I kept going
forward."

In 1981, he enlisted the services of Charles Zachary Bornstein, a
young conductor fresh out of the Juilliard School, who oversaw his
monthlong immersion. He snagged a two-hour lesson in London with
Georg Solti. He studied German. He lifted weights.

"Your arms get tired from two minutes of changing a light bulb," Mr.
Kaplan told The Times of London. "Try keeping them up for an hour
and a half."

He seeded his copy of the score with a thicket of notations. "Start
left," the first one read, a reminder to aim his baton toward the
violins at the outset.

He rented Avery Fisher Hall and engaged the American Symphony and
the Westminster Symphonic Choir. The orchestra, collectively
astonished, agreed on two conditions: that no tickets be sold and no
reviews be published.

On Sept. 9, 1982, Mr. Kaplan mounted the podium for what he intended
simultaneously to be his debut and his farewell performance, an
invitation-only gala for 2,700 guests, staged at an estimated cost
of $100,000.

He had solved the problem of his music literacy by conducting the
entire score from memory. Should his memory fail, he said, he
planned to turn to the audience and announce, "Ladies and gentlemen,
dinner is served."

But he did not need to, finishing the performance to a thunderous
ovation.

At least one critic in the house, Leighton Kerner of The Village
Voice, broke the embargo to publish a glowing review, declaring the
performance to be "one of the five or six most profoundly realized
Mahler Seconds I had heard in a quarter-century."

Offers poured in, and Mr. Kaplan went on to lead the piece with the
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic of London,
the Russian National Orchestra, the Philharmonic Orchestra of La
Scala and dozens of other ensembles.

There was some jeering. "The Resurrectionist," the headlines called
him, "One-Hit Wonder" and, inevitably, "Walter Mitty."

More seriously, some reviewers taxed Mr. Kaplan with being a
checkbook maestro, paying orchestras to let him ascend the podium.
He denied doing so, although he acknowledged that his refusal to
accept a fee constituted a de facto savings for the ensembles he
led.

Perhaps the worst moment in Mr. Kaplan's new career came in December
2008, when he led the "Resurrection" with the New York Philharmonic.
On the day of the concert, the musicians held an hourlong meeting
with the orchestra's president, Zarin Mehta, to vent their
frustration with Mr. Kaplan's musicianship.

Mr. Kaplan was not invited to lead the Philharmonic again, but there
were laurels elsewhere. He recorded the "Resurrection" with full
orchestra twice, first with the London Symphony and later with the
Vienna Philharmonic.

The London Symphony recording, featuring the London Symphony Chorus
and the vocal soloists Benita Valente and Maureen Forrester, was
named by The New York Times as one of the best classical records of
1988. By 2008, it had sold more than 180,000 copies, making it, The
Times reported, the biggest-selling Mahler recording of any kind.

Mr. Kaplan's other work includes "The Mahler Album," a lavishly
illustrated book he published in 1995. He was also a noted collector
of Surrealist art.

Mr. Kaplan's brother, Mr. Brooks, committed suicide in 2011, two
years after he had been charged with drugging and sexually
assaulting more than a dozen women.

Besides his daughter Emily, Gilbert Kaplan's survivors include his
wife, the former Lena Biörck, whom he married in 1970 and who wears
the only ring that Mahler was known to have given his wife, Alma;
two other daughters, Kristina Wallison and Claude Davies; a son,
John; and eight grandchildren.

Mr. Kaplan served over the years on the boards of the American
Symphony and Carnegie Hall, and taught in the evening division of
the Juilliard School.

If, in his unplanned second act, Mr. Kaplan was tilting at
windmills, at least he was doing so with one of Mahler's batons,
which he also owned. And though some critics continued to snipe, his
work, admirers said, unmistakably reflected his passion, his fealty
to Mahler's intentions and, quite possibly, the idea that a man's
grasp might sometimes equal his reach.

He was, in any case, far from the only conductor to incur critical
barbs with the "Resurrection."

Reviewing the United States premiere of the piece, The New York
Times praised the performance generally, but described some aspects
as "lacking in unity and proportion" and "fragmentary and bizarre."

That concert took place in December 1908 and featured the New York
Symphony Orchestra, a progenitor of the Philharmonic.

On the podium was Gustav Mahler.