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Week of 12 November 1999 Vol. III, No. 14 Arts Mahler maven to lead BU Symphony and Chorus By Michael B. Shavelson Conversation in Gilbert Kaplan's Park Avenue office, as in most of Manhattan, inevitably carries on against an aural wallpaper of wailing sirens and accelerating buses. Kaplan is oblivious to the noise. He is concerned with explaining to a visitor one of the quietest moments in symphonic music, a passage in Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2, which he will conduct at Symphony Hall with BU musicians on November 22. A score sits on a coffee table and Kaplan -- 58, tall, and dressed like a cautious banker -- asks the visitor to turn to rehearsal mark 31 in the fifth movement. This is the point, more than an hour into the piece, when the chorus sings for the first time. The score reads "Langsam. Misterioso. ppp." ("Slowly. Mysterious. Very very quiet.") That this nearly inaudible choral entrance can mute the dissonance of a workaday morning in New York City tells us much of what we need to know about the man we've come to meet. Kaplan is the multimillionaire founder and former publisher of Institutional Investor -- and the conductor of the best-selling Mahler recording of all time. Since 1982 he has led the work in 24 countries. What makes this tale worth telling is that 1) Kaplan had no real musical training until, at 40, he decided to learn to direct the Mahler Second, 2) he conducts it extremely well (many say definitively), and 3) he conducts no other work. In 1965 Kaplan heard a performance of the Mahler Second at New York's Carnegie Hall, conducted by Leopold Stokowski. It was the first Mahler he had ever heard and the music upended his life. "I think the best explanation I can give is that I walked into the hall one person and I walked out another," he says. "It was love at first sight, an emotional connection I couldn't explain then and that still baffles me now." The music shadowed Kaplan for years. In 1981 he came up with a means of confronting its hold and perhaps understanding its power. He decided to conduct the piece. "I felt that by conducting it, I might be able to take it apart and put it back together in a way that would help me to understand why it had such an emotional claim on me. It turned out that after conducting it, I still didn't understand. But along the way I fell into this mini second career." While Kaplan had the financial means to hire a tutor and eventually an orchestra to allow him to realize his fantasy, there was every reason to think the idea was foolish. Here was a man who had never even seen an orchestral score in his life. His task began with learning to read music and progressed to imbedding every note of a long and difficult work in his head and then figuring out how to convey his wishes to more than 200 instrumentalists and singers. Gilbert Kaplan has conducted Mahler's Second around the world. He will lead BU musicians at Symphony Hall on November 22. Photo by Marc Hom Kaplan signed up Charles Bornstein, a recent graduate of the Juilliard School's conducting program, and got down to business. "We went bar by bar," he says, "and I was very discouraged at the beginning. We worked for about nine hours a day, every day, but at the end of two weeks, I had learned only about 14 pages. That's not very much out of a 209-page score. But then the obvious struck me: 14 pages in two weeks meant one page a day. So it was going to take me about seven months. That's what it took." In September 1982, Kaplan invited 2,700 business colleagues and friends to Lincoln Center to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Institutional Investor. The program: Kaplan conducting the American Symphony Orchestra in the Mahler Second. Then dinner. Kaplan shouldn't have been able to do it. He had crammed what ought to have been decades of training into seven months. The symphony is massive and treacherous. The conductor has to propel an extra-large orchestra, offstage band, chorus, and two solo singers along a physically and emotionally draining 85-minute exploration of life's very meaning. If the concert had fallen apart, he says with a smile, "I could always have turned to the audience and announced, 'Dinner is served.'" Not only did he pull off the technical feat, but he created music &emdash; worlds more difficult than getting the orchestra and singers to sound the right notes at the right times. Kaplan likes the bumblebee analogy when it comes down to explaining how he did it. "It is said that given its body mass and wing size, it is aerodynamically impossible for the bumblebee to fly. But the bumblebee doesn't know that." It was the same with conducting this enormous composition, he says. "I spent a year thinking about it and not starting because it did seem impossible. But the impossible can be broken down into small pieces. And if you try a small piece, you can then decide whether you want to try the next step. I could have stopped at any point, but it began to build." The ASO invited him back for a public performance at Carnegie Hall in April 1983, and critics recognized that Kaplan was not just a rich businessman indulging himself. Word circulated, and the following year, orchestras in Tokyo and London invited him to conduct the only piece in his repertoire. His current log of appearances includes orchestras from China and Colorado to Israel and the Salzburg Festival in Austria. Kaplan's Salzburg debut in 1996 was a triumph with the audience at this shrine of Mozart and Beethoven, notwithstanding the sniping from some Viennese critics. But as writer (and COM professor) Michael Walsh reported in Time, "Mahler's heaven-storming climaxes shook the Grossesfestpielhaus to its granite foundations, and anyone who did not feel a chill at the tremendous peroration must either have been dead or Austrian." Kaplan's devotion to Mahler extends beyond the Second Symphony. He has, for example, edited The Mahler Album, a richly produced book displaying every known photograph of the composer, and he has established a foundation to promote Mahler research. Kaplan also managed, somewhere along the way, to purchase Mahler's final manuscript of the Second Symphony, which is on deposit at New York's Pierpont Morgan Library. He didn't buy it as a trophy, he emphasizes, but to ensure its availablilty to qualified scholars. He also bought it, one suspects, to see what secrets it might reveal about conducting the work. There are certainly clues, he says, mentioning a number of crossed-out markings that give us musicologic hints to the composer's intention. And sometimes Mahler's penmanship itself gives us a hand, as it does when we look at rehearsal mark 31. The printed page reads: "Langsam. Misterioso. ppp." But Mahler's hand tells us more. The manuscript has an exclamation point after Langsam, and the ppp is written in letters twice the size of the others. This is meant to be slow and exceptionally quiet. It's a point Kaplan emphasizes in his performances. One point among a thousand. "I believe that there cannot be a great performance of the symphony without taking into account the hundreds of directions that Mahler has given. Other conductors may say these things don't make such a difference," says Kaplan. "To me, they're a matter of life and death." Gilbert Kaplan will lead the Boston University Symphony Orchestra, Symphonic Chorus, and vocal soloists Kelly Kaduce (SFA'99) and Mary Hughes (SFA'00) in Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 at Symphony Hall on Monday evening, November 22, at 8. Call 266-1200 for tickets. Kaplan will discuss Mahler's Second Symphony with Ted O'Brien and Michael B. Shavelson on the WBUR 90.0 FM program Boston University's World of Ideas on Sunday, November 14, at 9 p.m.