Daniel Harding © Julian Hargreaves
Daniel Harding
Daniel Harding, born in Oxford in 1975, began his career assisting Sir Simon Rattle at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which he himself conducted for the first time in 1994. He later worked as Claudio Abbado’s musical assistant, and in 1996 became the youngest conductor to appear at the BBC Proms in London. That same year he also made his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker at the Berlin Festival, conducting works by Berlioz, Brahms and Dvořák.
After appointments with the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra in Norway and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden, he served as music director of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (1997–2003), principal conductor of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (2003–2011), music partner of the New Japan Philharmonic (2010–2016) and principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (2006–2017). Since 2007 Harding is music director of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. From September 2016 until summer 2019 he took on the same role with the Orchestre de Paris.
In constant demand in the world’s leading centres of music, he has appeared with many internationally acclaimed orchestras and conducted opera performances in houses as prestigious as the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, La Scala, Milan, the Vienna, Berlin and Munich State Operas and the Salzburg and Aix-en-Provence Festivals. In 2002 Daniel Harding was awarded the title Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government and in 2012 he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra honoured him with the lifetime title of Conductor Laureate. In 2018 he was named artistic director of the Anima Mundi Festival in Pisa. As a guest conductor with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Daniel Harding last appeared in September 2019 in the context of Musikfest Berlin 2019, when he conducted three concerts with Hector Berliozʼ “Roméo et Juliette”.
As of May 2020