How a self-made maestro silenced his critics
With little musical training, millionaire set out to conduct a symphony — and succeeded
Gilbert 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.
Originally trained as an economist, 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 (U.S.).
By then, 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 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 fulfilment 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.
By 1982, when Kaplan made his sweaty-palmed debut with the American Symphony Orchestra, he had undergone an immersion worthy of George Plimpton, devouring recordings, travelling the world to hear every live performance, grilling scholars and conductors and undergoing a month-long, nine-hour-aday boot camp in the mechanics of conducting.
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, Kaplan divided reviewers. Some called his perfor- mances lacklustre 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 topselling, 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.
Scraping together $150,000 — twothirds of it borrowed from Gerald Bronfman, whose family owned the Seagram distilling company — he put out the first issue of the Institutional Investor in March 1967.
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-inchief.
The “Resurrection” had put its hold on 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, an Australian 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,” 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 month-long 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,” 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, 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 quartercentury.”
Offers poured in, and 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, and “One-Hit Wonder” and “Walter Mitty.”
More seriously, some reviewers taxed Kaplan with being a chequebook 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 Kaplan’s new career came in December 2008, when he led the “Resurrec- tion” with the New York Philharmonic.
On the day of the concert, the musicians held an hour-long meeting with the orchestra’s president, Zarin Mehta, to vent their frustration with Kaplan’s musicianship.
Kaplan was not invited to lead the Philharmonic again, but there were laurels elsewhere.
Kaplan recorded the “Resurrection” 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.
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, 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 U.S. 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.
“I wanted to get inside the music. There’s a real explanation of life and death in that music, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it.” GILBERT KAPLAN IN A 1993 INTERVIEW