An Investor's Big Score

 

At first blush, it sounds like a George Plimpton stunt: the musical equivalent of some middle-aged touch-football player ineptly quarterbacking the Washington Redskins so he can go home and write a book about what it felt like to bumble around the field with the pros. But when 41-year-old Gilbert Kaplan, the founder and editor-in-chief of one of Wall Street's most influential monthly magazines, Institutional Investor, stepped up to the podium to lead the American Symphony Orchestra in Gustav Mahler's Symphony No.2 in C Minor, there was nothing half hearted or amateurish about it.

Ninety minutes later, whatever doubts were overshadowing the performance had been triumphantly erased. Wrote critic Leighton Kerner in The Village Voice, "Had the performance been merely 'got through' without a major disaster, any reasonable report could stop there. But it turned out to be one of the five or six most profoundly realized Mahler Seconds I have heard in a quarter-century."

To bring about such accolades, Kaplan had to be deadly serious about his involvement with the Resurrection Symphony, as the work is familiarly called. "My love for that one piece of music gave me the energy to go through with the whole thing," says Kaplan today, 14 months after his resounding debut in New York's Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. "Even so, when I look back, I still have trouble believing I did what I set out to do." What he had set out to do didn't come cheap. It cost some $125,000 of his own money, and one arduous year of

But interpreting one of Western music's more demanding symphonic pieces had been a long-held fantasy. In 1965, Kaplan, who abandoned piano lessons after three years of study as a child, heard Leopold Stokowski conduct the Resurrection with the ASO and felt something stir within him. As time passed, his fascination with the piece grew even deeper. Explains Kaplan, "As a composer, Mahler, perhaps more than any other, seems to write music full of contradictory emotions. It's hard to put into words, but there are passages where a rising, lifting melody is countered with the most profound sense of angst and despair one can find in music. Many conductors focus on only one side of the work, and so conduct it in a very superficial way. Why? Because to achieve the total result, one must pay enormous attention to the smallest details."

Paying that kind of attention to detail is one thing for a Leonard Bernstein, quite another for a full-time financial-magazine editor who, at the time, couldn't even read musical scores. So Kaplan committed the Mahler work to memory, phrase by phrase, page by page. ("It was the only way to get serious musicians to take me seriously," he explains.) During a month's vacation, he hired Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra conductor Charles Zachary Bornstein to coach him for nine grueling hours a day. They concentrated only on Mahler's first movement -- itself as long as some Mozart symphonies and even more difficult. Then he rehearsed it with professional musicians. Encouraged by their enthusiastic response, Kaplan plunged ahead with a oneyear plan that included visits to every city in the world where Mahler's Second was being rehearsed or performed.

"It was a little strange to spend a morning with the head of the Central Bank of Japan," he notes, "and then all afternoon and evening with a group of Japanese student musicians. But I was very fortunate in being able to combine international travel for the company with my other mission. And the experience, of course, was invaluable." Among the lessons: a two-hour tutorial with Hungarian-born maestro Sir Georg Solti on the fine points of baton waving. By the end of his long apprenticeship, he says, his arms were as muscled as a weightlifter's.

Kaplan's late-blooming entry into classical music took place on September 9, 1982. More than 2,700 friends and acquaintances came to the performance, including former British Prime Minister Edward Heath, New York Senator Daniel Moynihan, and Chase Manhattan Bank president Willard Butcher. Understandably, Kaplan was nervous -- but, he maintains, not too nervous. "The audience was more on edge than I was," he insists. "I'm sure seeing me up there, acting out my own ultimate fantasy, created more anxiety in them than it did in me."

If the audience sensed disaster, they did not get it. Indeed, the response was so favorable among listeners and musicians alike that the ASO invited Kaplar to conduct the work again last April at Carnegie. Hall. Since then, he has received firm offers to do the same in London and Tokyo next year, with additional performances elsewhere in the offing. As to whether he might branch out into other orchestral challenges, Kaplan is circumspect. "No," he modestly demurs, "I'm really not qualified to do that."