Mahler Scholar in One Second

Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony so inspired former New York magazine publisher Gilbert Kaplan that he learned to conduct the work and to become a leading authority on the composer.

Kaplan, founder of Institutional Investor magazine, will draw on his background and extensive Mahler collections when he gives preconcert lectures on the composer’s music and life today and Thursday before the Pacific Symphony plays Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Kaplan calls his fascination with the composer “a love affair.”

“For me, it grows and grows,” he said in a recent phone interview from his home on Long Island. “I had no idea Mahler’s Second, [the ‘Resurrection,’] was one of the most difficult symphonies when I took it on. I only knew I loved it. Not knowing too much sometimes helps.”

The amazing thing about Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Kaplan said, “is the degree to which Mahler presents basically in the opening bars all the ingredients that will be combined and recombined over the course of the symphony.”

Tragically, Mahler died in 1911 without conducting or even hearing the Ninth. If he had, Kaplan is sure he would have made changes.

“If you compare the published score of the Second Symphony with the original score Mahler had written, you will see there are hundreds of changes, which came about from Mahler’s conducting it. So I’m sure we don’t have the finished Ninth. As good as it is, it would have been changed.”

What makes Mahler’s music great, Kaplan says, is that it is “autobiographical, but, more than anyone else’s, [it is also] about feelings.

“Mahler was more capable than any other composer to express feelings in music, and I think the Ninth will demonstrate it,” Kaplan said. “On the very last page, there is the marking ‘adagissimo,’ [which means] the slowest possible adagio. It comes as close as anything any composer ever wrote to writing out the act of dying.

“That’s why Mahler can touch everybody. My contention is that his inner world is our inner world; his feelings are the ones we grapple with, and he could write it [all] down.

“Many composers cannot notate as well as they’d like to. They know what they want to express but can’t do it. He can do it.”

But there’s more to it than even that.

“Mahler also wrote contradictions in the music,” Kaplan said. “There’s never a sunny day without a cloud for Mahler.

“At the same time any one emotional quality is present, he will express a contradictory one--not sequentially, but at the same time. . . . That’s jarring for listeners. They don’t know if they’re being pushed or pulled.”

* Gilbert Kaplan will give a concert preview on Mahler’s life and music for Pacific Symphony ticket-holders at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 6:30 p.m. today and Thursday, free to ticket-holders. Carl St.Clair will conduct the orchestra in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at 8 p.m. $10-$48. (714) 556-2787.