MetaFilter posts tagged with kaplan

Conductor or charlatan?

bassjump — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 05:06:27 -0800

Gilbert Kaplan: businessman, investor, occasional journalist, and conductor of Mahler's vast Second Symphony. Or is he, really? Yes, Gilbert Kaplan only conducts one piece of music. And it's not some simple little string symphony. It's Mahler's sprawling Symphony No. 2, requiring him to negotiate a vast orchestra, choir, soloists, and offstage brass, and he conducts it from memory. He has twice recorded the work; his 1985 Cardiff recording has become the best-selling recording of Mahler 2, outselling interpretations by such luminary conductors as Bernstein, Abbado, and Boulez. But is he any good at conducting this piece? "That Mr. Kaplan is no professional conductor was immediately apparent." -Review in the New York Times A "rank amateur" but one now "acknowledged as the leading technical authority on Mahler’s second symphony, consulted by many professional maestros on matters of detail." -The Economist "Each cue was exact without a wasted gesture. His beats were about as textbook as I've ever seen from a conductor." -Phil Catelinet Now David Finlay, a musician in the New York Philharmonic - where Kaplan recently conducted the one piece he knows for the 100th anniversary of the work's premiere in New York - has spoken out against Kaplan. "I have to take extreme exception to the many reviews I have read of his performances.... Mr. Kaplan excels in ignoring the blizzard of Mahler's performance direction." And: "My colleagues and I gave what we could to this rudderless performance, but the evening proved to be nothing more than a simplistic reading of a very wonderful piece of music." On the day of the performance, after hours of rehearsals, members of the orchestra demanded a meeting with orchestra president Zarin Mehta and complained for an hour about Kaplan. So has Kaplan been fooling the music world? Has he been riding on the coattails of Mahler and the American dream? Or is he truly that rare amateur who has learned a new skill at a professional level?

Fixing Foreign Entanglements

wittgenstein — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:15:25 -0800

Fred Kaplan gives President Obama suggestions on foreign policy repair.

Mounting the Flour

jtajta — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 09:09:18 -0800

"When you squeeze it, its golden brown crust should crackle and even sing. Its aroma should be a little bit sweet, a little bit toasty. There should be a good marriage between its crust and its interior crumb. When the crumb is pressed, it should spring back rapidly. Its color should be off-white and its cavities widely distributed and uneven in size. Its nutty, buttery taste should be both sweet and savory - like a good chardonnay.” Bread expert and Cornell prof Steven Kaplan talks with Conan, to pretty hilarious effect, about his latest book. You may have to snoop around the NBC site - I couldn't find a direct link. The man is really into baguettes. He's given a few entertaining radio interviews as well, and a New York magazine profile of him features a list of his six favorite NYC baguettes. If you don't have a great bakery nearby, you can try your hand at home. Bonus Game: Balance the Baguette! (from a previous post)

F'd Metal

grumdrig — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 09:26:35 -0800

Philip J. Kaplan is probably best known as the founder of Fuckedcompany which chronicled the bustiest parts of the dot-com boom Fewer, perhaps, recognize him in his guise as power-glam-rocker Beef Savage. Beef has been silent for years, but has now been (barely) reinvented as The Metalizer. "I take regular songs (that suck) and turn them into heavy metal songs (that ROCK)."

Kaplan's Imperial Grunts

loquax — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 08:58:34 -0800

Imperial Grunts: With the Army Special Forces in the Philippines and Afghanistan—laboratories of counterinsurgency. Robert Kaplan's new book has been excerpted over the last while in the Atlantic Monthly, and it's an amazingly relevant and enthralling book. It draws several parallels that are perhaps underrepresented in the media, such as the the similarities between the Iraqi and Afghani insurgency and the the Philippine-American War. It's also an incredible look at the logistics and tactics involved in fighting wars, both at the forward-operating Special Forces level and within the macro "Big Army" bureaucracy. The focus of the book is the status and abilities of American "empire", its use of power and its goals.