Gilbert Kaplan

Edmond Gilbert Kaplan ( born March 3, 1941 in New York City ) is an American entrepreneur and business journalist, who became an amateur conductor to a world-renowned interpreters of the 2nd Symphony of Gustav Mahler.

Life and work

Gilbert Kaplan is the son of a tailor. He completed an economics degree and, in 1967, the monthly magazine Institutional Investor, which developed very successfully in the sequence. 1984 Kaplan sold the magazine for a considerable profit.

1965 impressed him a performance of the Symphony No. 2 by Gustav Mahler under Leopold Stokowski in such a way that he can - without extensive musical training, apart from a few years of piano lessons as a child - is increasingly concentrated on the study of this work. In 1981, he studied conducting with Charles Zachary Bornstein, a graduate of the Juilliard School. In the same year he rented the American Symphony Orchestra and conducted it with the first movement of the symphony. In 1982 he conducted the complete Symphony at Avery Fisher Hall in front of an invited audience; the performance was subsequently repeated in public.

Since then, Kaplan has developed into a world-renowned conductor of the Symphony No. 2 by Gustav Mahler and directed more than 50 renowned orchestra in performances of this work, including Los Angeles Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, the NDR Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Orchestra of the Bavarian State Opera, Prague Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Beijing Symphony Orchestra (Chinese premiere of Mahler's Symphony No. 2 ) or Melbourne Symphony. He was invited to be the first amateur conductor 1996 to conduct at the Salzburg Festival.

Kaplan's recording of Mahler's 2nd Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1987 was elected in 1988 by the New York Times as one of the Records of the Year. In more than 175,000 copies sold, it became the best-selling Mahler recording history. A second recording of the work under Kaplan took place in 2002 with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Kaplan's skills as a conductor are not without controversy despite various awards. Thus, members of the New York Philharmonic stopped him before 2008 public craftsmanship defects.

Kaplan devotes himself almost exclusively to Mahler's Symphony No. 2, the only exceptions are the " Adagietto " from Mahler's 5th Symphony, which he also recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, Mahler and Franz Schubert's String Quartet processing of Death and the Maiden. He also acted in 1993 as a producer of Mahler Plays Mahler, a recording of Mahler's self -established in 1905 on a Welte-Mignon reproducing piano piano rolls, which was awarded a prize by the German Record Critics' Award in 1994.

Gilbert Kaplan is a faculty member of the Juilliard School (Evening Division ), lectures internationally on Gustav Mahler and published articles about him. The Kaplan Foundation, founded by him in 1985 is committed to the care and preservation of the works of Gustav Mahler. Among the previously funded by the Foundation projects, the publication of facsimiles of the autographs of the Symphony No. 2 include ( the handwriting had acquired Kaplan 1984 ) and the " Adagietto " from Symphony No. 5, a discography of all Mahler recordings, image - Bio The Mahler album (Eng. the Mahler album) and the Welte-Mignon piano rolls, the new critical edition of the score of the Symphony No. 2 (Kaplan, together with Renate Stark - Voit co-editor as part of the Mahler Complete Edition by Universal Edition ) and the restoration of Gustav Mahler's " composing ". Furthermore, Kaplan prompted the publication of Mahler started by string orchestra version of the quartet Death and the Maiden by Schubert.