Since 1982 he has toured the world to conduct the Second. In 1987, he produced a recording, which reportedly has become the best-selling Mahler record of all time. By all rights, it should be an absolutely brilliant and definitive document, a perfect distillation of a lifetime of thought and effort, boasting a clarity of vision that forever strips away the distortions of misguided egos and sets an impossibly high standard against which all other performances, past and future, must always be measured and found wanting. Toscanini, who preached adherence to a score, and who left us powerful readings of other German repertoire, never touched Mahler. Kaplan's reading is sterile.
Every note is in the right place, every tempo is scrupulously observed, every accent is correct.
Despite the thoroughness of the scholarship and the sincerity of the intentions, something essential is missing - the vision of an artist. For the Resurrection, it takes the unfettered wildness of Oskar Fried, the warm humanity of Bruno Walter, the steadfast inertia of Otto Klemperer, the huge power of Georg Solti, the surprising freshness of Carl Schuricht or the overwhelming emotion of Leonard Bernstein. Craftsmanship may get by with perspiration, but art demands inspiration. Whatever energy was saved in the performance, though, was lavished on the packaging. Instead of a token brochure, there were two thick booklets stuffed with extensive program notes, historical essays, photos, bios and a hundred letters tracing the fascinating evolution of the work.