When Mahler’s Second Symphony Is First : Financial whiz Gilbert Kaplan conducts a global love affair with a special symphony

It wasn’t much of a surprise when music by Mahler recently appeared on Billboard and Times of London classical best-seller charts. But the conductor was startling: an American named Gilbert Kaplan.

After all, this Kaplan fellow was not leading a “Mahler Goes to the Movies” or “Luciano’s Favorite Mahler” collection. Rather, it was the composer’s daunting, 80-minute-plus Second Symphony, subtitled “Resurrection,” with its vast choral and orchestral forces.

Furthermore, this version of the Mahler Second was competing on the charts with new recordings of the same work conducted by Leonard Bernstein, the world’s designated Mahlerian, and Simon Rattle, current darling of the concert world.

But Kaplan’s recording with the London Symphony is, amazingly, outselling Bernstein’s Grammy-nominated version (it didn’t win) and is No. 2 in Britain, right behind the re-release of the late Jacqueline Du Pre’s interpretation of the Elgar Cello Concerto. Rattle is far behind.

Kaplan--erstwhile stock - market whiz kid, self-made millionaire, founder and publisher of that bible of the big-money industry, Institutional Investor magazine--represents all those dreamers who posture dramatically before the home stereo, pencils-as-batons waving furiously before the invisible orchestra blasting through the loudspeakers. He is fulfilling, as Kaplan himself puts it, “secret ambitions--like playing for the Yankees, or getting the girl they never got”--or, one might add, conducting the London Symphony.

But Kaplan has an advantage: He happens to be the world’s foremost expert on the Mahler Second Symphony. And not merely because he owns the composer’s autographed score. It is the only work that he conducts (in fact, he learned to conduct solely to express his feelings about this music). He has since led the work in New York, London, Stockholm, Budapest, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Mexico City, with Caracas, Frankfurt and Copenhagen next on the itinerary.

In a recent interview, he was basking in the release of the Mahler Second recording, with the London Symphony Orchestra, various English and Welsh choruses, and soloists Benita Valente and Maureen Forrester (MCA Classics 2-11011, two compact discs).

Speaking softly, almost reticently, in the Madison Avenue offices of Institutional Investor--which overlook St. Patrick’s Cathedral--Kaplan said he came from a nonmusical but music-loving middle-class family in suburban Long Island. As a youngster, he took the prescribed piano lessons and only when these proved non-productive did he begin to like music.

His story:

“By the time I was 40, I’d completely forgotten how to read music--not that I ever got beyond the simplest piano score. And even today, I couldn’t tell you what piece of music I was looking at if you stuck a score in front of my nose . . . aside from the Mahler Second.

I don’t think I’d heard a note of his music until the mid-1960s. I was 23 and involved with the American Stock Exchange, for which I became an expert in various arcane areas of trading on the floor.

One day, a friend invited me to a rehearsal of the Mahler Second, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the American Symphony Orchestra. I sat and listened but didn’t feel that a great impression had been made on me.

Later, I kept re-hearing bits and pieces of the music. And I had trouble sleeping that night. That hadn’t happened to me with music before. So I bought a ticket for the concert and what happened to me there is the origin of everything that came after. I can’t explain it other than to say that I walked out of Carnegie Hall a very different person.

The music reached me in a very basic, profound way. It wasn’t the words of the Mahler Second. I didn’t know they existed. I didn’t even look at the translation at that first performance. And yet knowing the text now, I can appreciate that the music itself speaks to certain issues.

But what first attracted me to the Mahler Second hasn’t diminished in importance. I just don’t know any other composer who has tried to deal with an explanation of life and death in a symphony. Those issues we already start tucking away as children. What Mahler’s music does is get under your skin in such a way that you can’t hide from those ideas away any longer. He forces you to come to grips with your emotions. . . .

For the next 15 years, there’s not much to the story except that I kept listening to the symphony on recordings and when there was a New York performance, every four or five years, I’d go. If I was in a foreign city and it was being done, I’d go. I never tired of it. I began to feel the piece was me. . . .

But I never thought about conducting . . . until 1980, when I must have had some notion of what might happen if I actually did conduct it. Would I discover why it had such a profound effect on me? If I took it apart could I put it back together again? At that point, I felt I was on a conveyor belt I wasn’t controlling. Which isn’t like me at all. I’m not a risk-taker.

I was watching myself act out a character. I spent a year talking to people about whether it would be possible for me conduct. By this time I was already on the board of directors of Carnegie Hall, so there were plenty of important people I could ask. I kept hearing the same comments. That conducting isn’t what it appears to be. That if one wanted to learn to conduct you’d start with something much simpler. They tried to tell me it was a foolish enterprise.

But I couldn’t give it up. I read books on conducting and couldn’t understand them. The diagrams in the books looked funny. Imagine diagrams on how to tie your shoelaces, they’d be pretty complicated. All those lines going all over the place. Yet I could tie my laces. That helped me to take a big step and led me to Charles Bornstein, a young musician I hired to teach me. He’d studied the piece in Vienna with Hans Swarowsky, the teacher of Zubin Mehta and Claudio Abbado.

We worked for 30 days, nine hours a day, in the summer of 1981. My goal was to see what could be accomplished and project beyond that what could be done in a year. I wouldn’t listen to any other music. Even if there was an easier piece that would help me learn to beat certain patterns. We worked with records. With the piano.

At the end of those 30 days, I booked the American Symphony and did a rehearsal. It worked. Barely. I remember how scared I was when I brought the baton down and nothing happened. Were they refusing to play for me? Then the sound came. I learned then that it takes time for the sound to come.

Well, they sat down and played and at the end gave me a big round of applause. They weren’t applauding a budding genius. They were approving of what I was doing. It wasn’t a stunt. They thought I’d done all right for someone who’d been at it for only a couple of years.

When I traveled around the world on magazine business, I made it a point to hear every possible performance of the Mahler Second. And I talked to the conductors--to Mehta and James Levine and Seiji Ozawa.

At first I was nervous about intruding on these famous musicians and their rehearsals. But I found the bigger the musicians, the nicer they were. I went to Denver to hear Leonard Slatkin conduct the Second and when I told him why I was there, he got so interested in telling me what to watch out for, what was tricky, that he skipped his dinner and just kept on.

And Sir Georg Solti, who’d agreed to see me for a few minutes in London. It turned into hours with me conducting and him at the piano, giving me important pointers.

I had nearly memorized the whole symphony. It was time to perform.

A one-shot affair in September: a private party in Carnegie Hall to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Institutional Investor. There’d be 2,700 people, most from the financial community, and I’d conduct the whole Mahler Second with the American Symphony.

I did it. It was a wonderful experience. It was the spark. The American Symphony had its own 20th anniversary coming and they asked if I’d do a benefit concert with the Mahler Second.

That was my debut. Afterward, invitations to conduct it elsewhere began.