Looking to take off into a new era after nearly two decades under charismatic Gustavo Dudamel, the Los Angeles Philharmonic hired Daniel Harding, a British conductor who also is an Air France pilot, as its next music director.
A 50-year-old known mostly for his work with European orchestras, Harding agreed to a six-year contract starting with the 2027-28 season, the LA Phil announced Tuesday. His first appointment by an American orchestra is with the ensemble that engaged him for his U.S. professional debut in 1997.
“It couldn’t have come a day sooner. I’m very glad it didn’t come a day later,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Paris. “The perfect timing, the right moment, and here we go.”
Harding will conduct eight weeks in his first season, then expand his commitment to 12 weeks annually. He also is in his second season of a five-year contract as music director of Italy’s Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.
Kim Noltemy, who became the LA Phil’s president and CEO in 2024, reached an agreement with Harding during dinner at Rome’s Portrait Hotel overlooking the Trinità dei Monti.
“He’s an incredible musician and an inspiring leader, a devoted educator,” Noltemy said. “He has a global perspective. He’s committed to working with the students. So he has all of the different pieces which we really hope to get in one person.”
Piloting long an interest for Harding
Harding has been interested in aviation since he was young and started piloting in 2014. He joined Air France in 2021 and flies Airbus A320s in Europe and North Africa. He hopes to become a first officer on either a Boeing 777 or Airbus A350, wide-body planes that fly trans-Atlantic.
“It’s absolutely the most logical thing that at some point in my first couple of years in my role in LA I will also start coming to LA with my other uniform on,” he said.
Conductor Simon Rattle, an early mentor, said Harding is restless and “he needs something to do with the second brain.”
Deborah Borda, who headed the LA Phil from 1999 to 2017, said Harding’s second job gives him “a fascinating take on the world.”
“He talked about how he had to study, how much of it was technical, how much pleasure he got from concentrating on that rather than just on music,” she said.
Relationship with American orchestra took time
Harding first conducted the LA Phil at the Ojai Music Festival in June 1997. He’s also performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra.
Harding developed a reputation as a conductor who irked some U.S. orchestras by talking too much.
“Because Daniel is an impatient and fast person by nature, that can be more difficult,” Rattle said. “He’s very self-aware and he realized that a lot of the things that are not going right are because he wasn’t able to physically show them in the best way.”
Harding’s manner stemmed from a need to show his worth.
“I wanted the musicians to understand that I wasn’t there just to profit from their expertise, that I’d done my work, I’d prepared myself, I had an opinion,” he said. “And if I spoke too much, it wasn’t because I thought I knew better than them, it was because I wanted them to know that I was trying to earn my place being there.”
Harding hired renowned conductor coach Mark Stringer to work with him.
Harding’s early career and influences
A trumpet player as a child, Harding’s big break came when he was 15 and a teacher at Chetham’s School of Music sent a recording of him in a performance of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” to Rattle, principal conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
“When he left school early and was a year too young to go to Cambridge, basically his parents gave him to us, so he kind of lived in and out of our house for that year,” Rattle said.
Harding became Rattle’s assistant in 1994, then was hired as Claudio Abbado’s assistant and debuted at the Berlin Philharmonic in 1996. He gained prominence when he led Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” in a Peter Brook production in 1998 at France’s Aix-en-Provence Festival.
Harding’s other prominent musical appointments include serving as music director of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, principal conductor of Norway’s Trondheim Symphony, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre de Paris.
Dudamel transformed the LA Phil during a tenure that started in 2009 and ends this summer when he leaves to become music director of the New York Philharmonic. LA is adopting an unusual musical leadership model that includes Dudamel as artistic and cultural laureate with a mostly four-week annual commitment, creative director Esa-Pekka Salonen (six weeks) and conductor-in-residence Anna Handler (three weeks).
“It’s a long commute,” Harding said of his new job, “but I have a particular easygoing relationship with airplanes, so that doesn’t bother me.”
