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Many conductors pursue hobbies of one kind or another, but Daniel Harding might be the only one who can boast of having a second, simultaneous career in a totally different field.
A few years ago, the Oxford-born maestro began piloting Airbuses for Air France, according to a November 2022 article in the Guardian, somehow managing to intersperse his airline work with engagements with the likes of the Berlin Philharmonic and Royal Concertgebouw.
“The conductor is the only person on stage who can do absolutely nothing on their own,” said Harding, who earned his commercial pilot license at age 40, to the Guardian. “Even if you’re working with people you’ve known for 20 years, and they’re good friends, you’re always slightly on the outside. One of the things I love about going to work for Air France is that I put on my uniform, I go and meet a new captain and cabin crew, and I’m part of the team. And knowing another world, how other people work and having a completely different role is healthy. I’ve learned things about myself and conducting in a year that I didn’t learn in 29 years before as a conductor.”
Area audiences will have a chance to see him in action — on the podium and not in the cockpit — when he returns Nov. 2-4 and 7 to guest-conduct the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a program that culminates with The Planets, Gustav Holst’s ever-popular 1914-17 musical evocation of the solar system. (In April, BR Klassik released Harding’s recording of The Planets with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.)
The centerpiece of the first half is Johannes Brahms’ Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny), Op. 54, a three-movement setting of a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin with orchestral accompaniment. It is considered one of composer’s most significant choral works, alongside a German Requiem.
Featured in both pieces is the Chicago Symphony Chorus, prepared by guest chorus master Jenny Wong. While it is heard during the entirety of Schicksalslied, it plays more of a supporting role in The Planets, with a female chorus singing a wordless line in the seventh movement, Neptune, the Mystic.
As an Air France pilot, “I’ve learned things about myself and conducting in a year that I didn’t learn in 29 years before as a conductor.” — Daniel Harding
Harding’s route to becoming a professional conductor was a combination of innate talent, audaciousness and luck. As youngster, he studied trumpet at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester, England, and joined the National Youth Orchestra at age 13. When he was 17, he gathered a group of his fellow musicians together to perform Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, hardly an easy or obvious choice.
The budding maestro then boldly sent a tape of the performance to Simon Rattle, who gained international prominence as the music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1980-1998. Then an extraordinary thing happened. Rattle listened to the tape and was so impressed that he hired Harding — still in his teens — to be his assistant in 1993-94.
“He doesn’t look very old now, but at age 16 or 17 he really looked 11,” Rattle said in a 2019 New York Times article, describing Harding’s first time in front of the ensemble, rehearsing Hans Werner Henze’s daunting Seventh Symphony. “I think the orchestra thought I was playing an April Fools’ game on them. And when this 11-year-old look-alike conducted the whole movement flawlessly, including wordlessly correcting some mistakes, the orchestra was completely flabbergasted.”
Harding then began studies at the University of Cambridge, but after one year, another famed conductor, Claudio Abbado, plucked him away to be his assistant at the Berlin Philharmonic. He first conducted that ensemble when he was just 21, and his career has soared since then.
Now 48 years old, Harding has held several posts, including serving as music director of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in 2003-2008 and the Orchestre de Paris in 2016-2019. His longest time anywhere has been with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, where he began as principal guest conductor in 2006 and became principal conductor a year later. His tenure with that orchestra is now scheduled to end after the 2024-25 season. More recently, he was named music director of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, a post he will begin in 2024-25.
“Over the 25 years of working together with the orchestra,” Harding said in a press statement announcing his Rome appointment, “we have explored a wide range of repertoire and forged a friendship that now becomes something very significant for all of us. It is a beautiful gift to be given the chance to become music director of a world-class orchestra of such ambition in a city of incomparable historical and cultural significance.”
