TT: What they do for love

A colossal brouhaha has been stirred up by Gilbert Kaplan, who led the New York Philharmonic in a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony last month. Kaplan, as Mahler-loving music buffs know, is a rich businessman with the sketchiest of musical training who fell in love with the Mahler Second, decided in middle age to become a conductor solely in order to perform that one piece, and has now conducted it all over the world and recorded it twice.
Kaplan tends to get pretty good reviews, but orchestral musicians are extremely skeptical about his abilities, and one of them, a trombonist for the New York Philharmonic by the name of David Finlayson, started a blog last month in order to blow the whistle on Kaplan, whom he described as “a very poor beater of time who far too often is unable to keep the ensemble together.”
The resulting fuss inspired me to write a “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal in which I discuss the fascinating phenomenon of the serious artistic amateur. Such folk typically approach their chosen art forms with appropriate and attractive modesty. One of them, a man whose name you would recognize in a different context, painted the canvas reproduced here. To find out who he is–and whether Gilbert Kaplan fits into that same category–pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.