In 1967 Gilbert Kaplan founded the financial journal Institutional Investor and 17 years later he sold it for US$100 million. Today multi-millionaire Kaplan is best-known internationally as an idiosyncratic conductor; not only is he an amateur who happens to have conducted the greatest orchestras in the world, he only ever conducts one piece of music over and over again, Gustav Mahler's second symphony, Resurrection.
Last week in London's Royal Festival Hall this 60-year-old, balding bespectacled New York businessman conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Brighton Festival Chorus in a performance that split the musical atom. Mahler said he composed Resurrection in an attempt to answer three of life's profoundest questions (why we live, why we die, and is there life after death?).
Under Kaplan's baton the massive breadth and profundity of Mahler's work has been realised in a way that has won him international acclaim. In 1996 Kaplan became the first amateur conductor to perform at the renowned Salzburg Festival and his recording of the work with the London Symphony Orchestra sold over 175,000 copies to become the all time best-selling Mahler recording.
Kaplan's obsession with Mahler's second began at New York's Carnegie Hall when Leopold Stokowski conducted the American Symphony Orchestra of New York. Kaplan has compared his musical obsession to a love affair. 'I first encountered this music when I was 25 and I felt an immediate connection, it kind of wrapped its arms around me and for reasons I couldn't explain then and I can't explain now, never let go.'
The symphony haunted him for years afterwards and over that time the unusual idea developed that he might unlock the mystery of the symphony by conducting it himself. Up until that point his musical education amounted to no more than three years of piano lessons. He worked on the piece with a conductor from the Juilliard School and travelled round the world to hear the symphony being performed and to talk to the conductors, including the likes of Sir George Solti.
However, as a non-believer in the after life Kaplan found it problematic to embrace the vision of an after life encompassed in the symphony. It was while performing the work in China that he discovered that the Chinese word for resurrection was close to the notion of self-renewal. This helped him to interpret the work in a secular way as self renewal during one's own lifetime, a rebirth of values and feelings for the living, rather than a resurrection after death.