Much has already been written about Gilbert Kaplan's extraordinary obsession with Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. A wealthy publisher and financier, he not only owns the manuscript and has published it in a facsimile that is a miracle of book-production, but he took lessons to enable him to conduct it. This he has done on many occasions, with several orchestras. Naturally this has led to a good deal of scepticism and to 'toffee-nosed' disparagement from some professional musicians and academics. With the uncharitableness and new puritanism which disfigure so much of today's writing about music, it will be viewed as a crime for an amateur to invade the closed shop and if the amateur also happens to be rich, then that is the ultimate indiscretion. No doubt Kaplan's wealth has been a big advantage to him (and to others, incidentally) but I suspect it is irrelevant in this case. If a post-office worker like the late Frank Walker, who was not a professional writer, devotes all his spare time to ferreting out and correcting errors and misconceptions about Hugo Wolf and Verdi so that he can write books about them which changed our perceptions of both composers, then that is scholarship and everyone admires it. Why should Kaplan's devotion to the minutiae of this Mahler symphony not be regarded in a similar spirit?
One answer, of course, is that writing is a solitary art and act. Conducting a choral symphony involves over 200 other people and persuading them to do what you want. Anyone can beat time; only a relative few can conduct and 'interpret'. Is Kaplan a conductor manque? Since he resolutely refuses to conduct any other work, no one can know. But having heard him at a concert and now on this recording, no one will persuade me that he cannot conduct Mahler's Second Symphony. An interpretation of this degree of excellence and emotional range cannot be faked by a nod, say from the orchestra leader.
Play any part of this recording to your Mahlerian friends, not saying whose it is, and you will probably receive some surprising answers: the 'innocent ear', unafflicted by snobbishness, is more likely to be unprejudiced. Where this recording is of especial value is in the scrupulous care taken to try to present the work in accordance with what has been discovered about Mahler's own performing practice. Thus, the choirs are placed so that the spatial effects are fully realized (as they are in Rattle's EMI recording). In the grosse Appell section of the finale, the brass are really at a great distance yet every note is clear and the stereophonic effect is sensational. (Technically the whole recording is on a par with EMI's and owes much to the acoustic of St David's Hall, Cardiff.) We hear the soprano soloist as and where Mahler intended we should and the use of the magnificent organ and bells from Yale University intensifies the apocalyptic quality of the sound of the finale.
But is this recording just a 'sonic photograph' of a score, a musicological exercise on disc? Emphatically not. Kaplan's belief in the tempos Mahler wanted gives us a tremendous first movement, full of contrast a lilting andante second movement and a really springy scherzo, with effortlessly lithe string playing by the LSO. (Their playing throughout is of the highest order.) Both soloists are in fine voice—how wonderful to have Maureen Forrester's noble and devout Urlicht, a link with the great Bruno Walter/CBS recording (now available on CD)—and the assorted choruses sing memorably. In the central section of the finale, I missed Rattle's blazing energy, while admiring Kaplan's firm control at this point. The two recordings complement each other and I should not wish to be without either.
In addition, there are 42 entry cues and two booklets, the first containing four articles about the history and performance of the symphony, the other giving all Mahler's letters about it—marvellous value.'