Gilbert Edmund Kaplan (born March 3, 1941, New York City, U.S.) 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 (Evening Division).
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.
Kaplan's conducting has attracted criticism: in December 2008, The New York Times reported that New York Philharmonic musicians had complained that his recent performance with the orchestra was a "woefully sad farce", and that he should not be allowed to conduct them again. Private Eye magazine claimed that Kaplan had only been allowed to conduct leading orchestras after paying them large amounts of money.
Kaplan is the brother of the late Joseph Brooks, 73, Academy Award-winning composer who was found dead at his New York City apartment on May 22, 2011 in an apparent suicide following a criminal indictment of multiple sexual-assault and rape counts.
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