Teen prodigy Daniel Harding: 'I was unfocused and the orchestra could smell blood'

Daniel Harding has just changed out of his aviation gear, having spent the past four hours in a flight simulator. That’s not typical practice for world-class conductors, but then Daniel Harding is not your typical world-class conductor.

There’s no bravado, no chutzpah – just a thoughtful and rather exacting personality, which, at this precise moment in time, has a desire to be airborne.

‘Amelia Earhart once said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty,’ he tells me, as we sit in a hotel garden in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, overlooking the tree-clustered island of Flat Holm in the Bristol Channel.

‘Three years ago I applied for a pilot’s licence because I thought that would be wonderful. As with music, there’s this constant thing of reaching a certain level; it’s like climbing a mountain – you get up there and then you see the next peak and want to conquer that.’

Harding is taking the flying lessons seriously. In the basement of his French home he has a full-sized cockpit with all the necessary gizmos for  it to work as a simulator for fixed-base training. 

I wonder why such dedication is necessary for someone who already has challenges enough. ‘It’s so engrossing that it shuts the music down for  a while, which is helpful. Plus, I am not good at doing nothing.’

In 1992, aged 17, Harding sent a tape of himself conducting a student production of Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire to Simon Rattle, who then hired him as an assistant at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Before he was out of his teens, Claudio Abbado, who referred to him as ‘my little genius’, gave him an assistant role with the Berlin Philharmonic.

He conducted there when he was 21 and, at that same age, became the youngest-ever conductor at the Proms. By the age of 30, he had been the first Briton to open a season at La Scala and was principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Harding would never describe himself as a former prodigy. Rather, at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester, he was ‘a geek in a school full of geeks’. He elaborates: ‘The friends I made at school had the most profound effects on me. I was surrounded by people who were incredibly passionate and opinionated. We used to sit around and discuss the finer points of Bernstein or Abbado conducting a Mahler symphony.’

This is not really normal teenage behaviour. Harding then demurs: ‘Actually, I think that kind of passion can be a normal teenage thing. Now  I have two teenagers [daughter Adele and son George], I can see that.’

But Harding’s passion took him further than most, and he was, he believes, young and eager enough to appreciate it. ‘Just the idea of going to boarding school, I thought, “Wow.” I was excited because it felt like a very grown-up thing to be doing, to be putting on my uniform and packing my trumpet.’

The trumpet was later discarded, though the musical drive remained, so much so that he abandoned his studies at Cambridge (‘It was too early for me’) after a year to work with Abbado.

Of course, success is never linear and Harding’s career suffered setbacks. In the Nineties, he walked out on Paris Opera after one rehearsal, disgusted by their attitude.

‘In truth, it is a nice anecdote [the walkout] but it has no meaning.’ Indeed, Harding acknowledges freely that he is now a very different person.

‘A decade ago, I was getting divorced [from violist Béatrice Muthelet]. I was having moments where I was really questioning things.’ Such as? ‘I didn’t know how my day-to-day life with my kids would work.’ His professional life began to suffer too. ‘I was unfocused and indecisive and [the orchestra] could smell blood. I should have taken time out but I didn’t because I was the last person to understand [what was happening].’

The problem with being a wunderkind is that there are some who will take a gleeful delight in watching you stumble. Aside from the well-publicised incident with Paris Opera, Harding has managed to avoid any spectacular missteps. And yet, there is always the criticism.

Many have been enraptured by Harding’s often breathtakingly cerebral conducting style, which comes out most when he’s taking on his beloved Mahler, constructing moments of towering musical strength with a calibrated, considered view, then wrong-footing you with a sudden burst of passion. 

Others, however, have been less taken with his approach, and Harding recites one particularly stinging attack. ‘Someone said I was pretentious and unmusical.’ He laughs. ‘I tend to remember every nasty thing that’s said and forget the good stuff, but I would never hold it personally against them.'

It was much worse when my grandmother was alive [a grandmother, incidentally, who was a member of the General Synod and who once had an assignation with Ralph Vaughan Williams in the back of a cab]. She had been a widow for 50-odd years and was bedridden.

The fact that I was forging my way as a conductor made her incredibly happy, so whenever someone wrote something horrible about me in a newspaper it came as a terrible blow to her. When she died, I thought, “OK, well at least there is nobody left who will care.”’

What about his father, a metallurgist at Oxford, and his mother, who worked in administration at the university’s engineering department? Both were amateur musicians. Both, surely, saw some of their own aspirations come to fruition in their son?

‘One of my great gifts is that my parents are so hands-off. When my mother was told she must be proud, she said, “Why? His musical talent has nothing to do with me. I am just proud he’s a nice boy.”’

Harding is nice – unassuming in a way, but with a pedagogic air that comes out when he tries to explain things. Similes abound: trying to move home is like driving an oil tanker; his early years as a musician were like ‘pushing off from the edge of a swimming pool’. 

He is small, with delicate, quietly handsome features, offset by hair that’s a subtle shade of red. He worries, slightly, about how he is perceived when he’s on the podium. ‘I don’t have a persona and that is a problem. I can look at my colleagues and do a pen caricature of what they represent.

But what am I? I’m the child of middle-class university lecturers. It’s annoying because we have become so personality-focused, when really audiences should be listening to the music.’

I wonder, though, whether there is an edge  to Harding, a core of steel that is essential when you are leading 100 people every night through  a process that requires technical precision and emotional intelligence. How would those who work for him describe him?

‘I don’t know,’ he shrugs, before conceding, ‘they would probably say I was obsessive and demanding and a little impatient. As a conductor, you are a perfectionist, but you also have to accept that perfection is impossible. It sounds pretentious, but there is a lot of responsibility that comes with the job. I mean, no one is going to die, but you are responsible, up to a point, for the well-being of 100 people. If you feel good, they will feel better.

‘When I had my worst anxieties about conducting, Simon [Rattle] said to me, you don’t want to be the conductor for whom everything is like water off a duck’s back. It takes a long time to come to terms with that.’

I am not quite sure what he means. Doesn’t toughening yourself up involve becoming less sensitive to those around you?

‘In my experience, the bad conductors are the ones who say, “Yes, I’ve heard they [the orchestra] can be terribly difficult, but strangely they are always very nice to me.” It’s much more useful if conductors are honest with each other because there aren’t very many of us in the world. We need each other a little bit, you know. It’s a lonely job.’

Harding describes near-contemporaries such as Gustavo Dudamel and Andris Nelsons as a ‘very nice group of people’, yet I detect a slight sense of detachment, perhaps born out of the fact that he has spent so much of his life travelling.

Harding’s has been an international, principally European, career and his accent – which sometimes floats over the English Channel and at other times seems to veer further east towards Germany – bears this out. He says he has no interest (for now) in staking a claim on home turf. He will, however, go back to the Proms later this season, conducting Mahler’s Sixth Symphony for the Vienna Philharmonic.

‘History can manifest itself in a slightly pressurising way, but the Proms is a place where the tradition feels enjoyable. The audience is there to celebrate and that means the atmosphere is electric.’

For the past five years, Harding has lived (when his schedule allows) with his children and partner, Elise, in Monaco. He loves its sleepiness and was delighted he was able to see all his favourite Francis Bacon paintings in one room at a local exhibition – but professional demands have dictated that he must uproot to Paris.

‘I think the peripatetic phase of my life may be coming to an end,’ he says. ‘It has given me joy and stimulation, but  I have begun to realise that I can’t do it any more.’

At his lowest ebb a decade ago, Harding felt a certain rage. He prefers being older – he turns 42 this month – but sometimes wishes he could go back and do it all again. ‘I know it’s ridiculous,’ he says.

‘Nevertheless, things seem to be working for me at the moment. I’m not looking for any more recognition. If I was Andris Nelsons or Gustavo Dudamel, I wouldn’t have time to fly an airliner and, actually, that makes me very happy.’

Daniel Harding appears at the BBC Proms on  7 September, at 6.30pm (royalalberthall.com)