Gilbert Kaplan

Who is Gilbert Kaplan?

Gilbert Edmund Kaplan is an American businessman, former journalist and amateur conductor.

He founded the magazine Institutional Investor in 1967. He was publisher of the magazine until 1990, and editor-in-chief for three more years, although he sold it in 1987 for $72 million. He then concentrated on conducting, hiring Avery Fisher Hall in New York for his debut in 1982. He set up the Kaplan Foundation dedicated to Gustav Mahler. After personal research, he has twice recorded Mahler's Second Symphony: with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1987, and with the Vienna Philharmonic in 2002. He has bought the autograph of Mahler's score of this symphony and commissioned a facsimile edition of the score. He is co-editor of the new critical edition of the Second Symphony as part of the Complete Critical Edition of Mahler's works, to appear soon. He is a member of faculty of the Juilliard School.

Mahler's Second Symphony is the only complete work he conducts, although he has also recorded the Adagietto from Mahler's Symphony No. 5.

In February 1994, Kaplan conducted the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in Mahler's Second Symphony. At the post-performance dinner in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria, the keynote speaker was the then Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, a noted aficionado of Mahler.