EGN NEWS DESK
On a stormy day greater than 34,000 toes above Paris, Air France Flight 1205 ready to make its descent. Flight attendants started checking seat backs and tray tables, and passengers groggily emerged from naps.
Then a voice from the cockpit came to visit the intercom, providing an replace on the climate (cloudy and 54 levels) and the remaining flight time (about half-hour).
“Thank you for selecting Air France,” mentioned Daniel Harding, the flight’s first officer. “And bear in mind: Rehearsal is at 6 p.m.”
The cabin erupted into whistles and cheers. Harding, 49, an Air France pilot, additionally occurs to be one of many world’s prime orchestral conductors. And on this December day, he was flying his ensemble, the esteemed Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, from its dwelling base in Rome to Paris for the beginning of a European tour. (A number of dozen unknowing members of the general public have been additionally aboard.)
Over the previous few years, the British-born Harding has led twin, and sometimes dueling, careers: conducting Mozart and Mahler symphonies someday, piloting business flights to Paris, Milan, Stockholm and Tunis the following. He relishes the exacting routine of flying — checking gasoline figures, analyzing climate patterns, tallying passengers and cargo. He can also be energized by the dangers he can soak up music.
“In flying, we’ve to establish all of the threats and ensure we don’t go wherever close to them,” he mentioned. “In music, it’s the alternative: We must get as shut as we will to disaster.”
Harding is a rarity in business flying: a pilot with a thriving creative profession. And within the high-pressure, all-consuming classical music subject, the place stars are sometimes anticipated to indicate absolute devotion to their craft, he’s an outlier, exhibiting there may be life past the live performance corridor.
“I don’t suppose it’s practical to say simply since you love one thing, it is best to do it 24 hours a day, each single day,” he mentioned. “I simply don’t suppose that’s human.”
The famend conductor Simon Rattle, who first met Harding when he was a sandy-haired 16-year-old conducting prodigy, mentioned he had develop into “one of many nice ones” who might sort out virtually any piece with any orchestra.
“Flying has given him a middle, a stability to his music,” Rattle mentioned. “It has made him a greater musician and a a lot calmer individual.”
IN THE COCKPIT that December day, Harding was targeted, a cup of coffee by his facet. He was nonetheless attending to know the Santa Cecilia orchestra, Italy’s unofficial nationwide symphony since 1908, and he had proposed the flight to usher in his tenure, which started in October.
Now he needed to carry out for his musicians. He fearful in regards to the touchdown.
“If I bang the airplane down onerous in the present day,” he mentioned, “they’re going to speak about it for the following 20 years.”
In the cabin, the musicians cheered their chief on. They joked about what to name him. Maestro? Pilot? Captain? They handed the two-hour journey with some music, singing a rendition of “Volare.” At one level, the clarinetist Alessandro Carbonare carried out an excerpt from Puccini’s “Tosca” from his seat in row 19.
When Carbonare informed his mom that Harding was flying the orchestra to Paris, she didn’t imagine him.
“Nobody can think about it,” he mentioned, “a conductor who additionally flies. I simply hope we arrive safely in Paris. That will probably be sufficient.”
As the airplane descended, Harding invited Santa Cecilia’s live performance grasp and its assistant conductor into the cockpit to look at the touchdown. In the cabin, there was nervous laughter when the airplane encountered turbulence.
As the Paris skyline got here into view, a flight attendant chimed in over the intercom: “Prepare for maestro touchdown.”
HARDING WAS BORN in Oxford, England, to a lecturer in engineering and a college administrator, who have been newbie musicians. He started taking part in trumpet at 8, after listening to a Christmas efficiency of Handel’s “Messiah.” At dwelling, he additionally dabbled in conducting, shifting his arms alongside to recordings of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. At 13, he enrolled at Chetham’s School of Music, a boarding faculty in Manchester.
When Harding was 17, a teacher despatched Rattle, then the 37-year-old music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, a letter describing his preternatural talent at main Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” in school. Rattle invited Harding and his classmates to Birmingham to work on the piece.
“It was form of astonishing,” Rattle recalled. He took Harding underneath his wing, hiring him as an assistant and feeding him a gradual weight-reduction plan of ham sandwiches.
Harding rose in classical music with staggering pace. At 17, he carried out bits of a rehearsal in Birmingham as Rattle seemed on. At 19, he landed a dream gig as an assistant to Claudio Abbado, then the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, who had impressed him to be a conductor. At 21, he made his debut with that orchestra, and at 22, he signed his first recording contract.
“It all appears totally absurd now,” he mentioned. “At the time, I didn’t perceive how distant from my very own competence it was. If I had any perspective, I’d have been paralyzed by worry.”
Abbado, who took to calling his protégé “my little genius,” taught Harding to make himself superfluous to the orchestra, so the musicians would really feel extra free to experiment.
“He was at all times attempting to take himself out of the equipment,” Harding recalled.
Harding went on to vaunted posts atop the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre de Paris. He performed an vital function in shaping the famend Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which Abbado began in 1997, main the ensemble for eight years.
But there have been additionally challenges. He struggled to discover a music directorship within the United States, after some tense appearances there early in his profession. Some musicians discovered him conceited and aloof, they usually have been irked by his behavior of talking at size from the rostrum. (“I come and simply discuss, discuss, discuss,” Harding later mentioned, “and that’s simply not the way it works right here.”)
When Harding was in his mid-30s, he employed a conducting coach, hoping to hone his communication fashion and method. (Harding by no means studied at a conservatory.) Around the identical time, he went by means of a divorce that he has mentioned left him “unfocused and indecisive.”
Harding stored up a busy efficiency schedule. But as he approached his fortieth birthday, he mused on his pursuits outdoors classical music. He challenged himself to coach as a pilot, pondering he had earned the luxurious of “taking a bit time, only for me, to be taught one thing.”
He had been fascinated by flying since he was a baby, when he performed with a flight simulator on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum dwelling laptop. He flew on a small airplane for the primary time as a teen on the invitation of an orchestra musician in Birmingham. During that flight, he mentioned, he fell in love with the “sensations and great thing about flying.”
In 2014, for his birthday problem, Harding enrolled in a flight faculty in southern France. In his down time between live shows and rehearsals, he studied subjects like aerodynamics and aviation regulation. At one level, he put in a flight simulator in his basement. After a number of years, he earned his non-public and business pilot’s licenses, in addition to certification to fly the Airbus A320.
To get the Air France job, he undertook a sequence of exams, interviews and psychometric evaluations. He pointed to his expertise in music to reassure the airline that he would work properly with colleagues.
“Being a conductor,” he mentioned, “is the last word group exercise.”
HARDING NOW SPENDS ABOUT every week every month flying medium-haul flights for Air France in Europe and North Africa, scheduled round his performances. (He has piloted a whole bunch of flights and accrued about 1,300 flight hours since becoming a member of the airline in 2021.) The association has largely labored, although he has at occasions canceled flying engagements on the final minute to substitute for ailing conductors.
Air France has counted Olympic athletes, astronauts and medical doctors in its ranks of pilots through the years — however no different conductors.
The airline mentioned in a press release that it preferred to help workers with particular abilities by granting flexibility in scheduling. Harding was skilled to fulfill “the identical excessive requirements to make sure the very best degree of flight security,” a spokesman for Air France added.
When Lucien Delille, a classical music fan who additionally works as an Air France pilot, heard that Harding was working for the airline, he was shocked. He acknowledged Harding’s identify from the radio.
Delille, who now flies commonly with Harding, mentioned the conductor has a ardour for troublesome routes — these with mountains, brief runways and volcanoes.
“He lives for the journey,” Delille mentioned.
WHEN FLIGHT 1205 touched down in Paris round midday, the Santa Cecilia musicians applauded and shouted “Bravo!” As they disembarked, Harding, in a trim navy uniform with gold braids, greeted each, providing handshakes and hugs. Some gamers snapped selfies.
“It’s the primary time I’ve heard of a person flying a airplane within the morning and conducting a live performance within the night,” the violinist Leonardo Micucci informed him.
Harding mentioned he was happy it had been a clean flight and that the touchdown was mild.
“There was temptation for a bit emotion,” he mentioned. “But I managed to place that apart. The emotion is for this night.”
In the afternoon, Harding returned to his Paris house to see his household and to take a one-hour nap. Then, round 5 p.m., in a sweatshirt and denims, he headed to the Philharmonie de Paris live performance corridor for a rehearsal forward of that night’s efficiency of Debussy, Brahms and Prokofiev.
In his dressing room, stocked with bananas, lemons, nuts and cookies, he seemed over his scores and conferred with the night’s soloist, the violinist Lisa Batiashvili. She described Harding as a “actual pilot” on the rostrum.
“He is extraordinarily versatile,” she mentioned, “and very able to obtain your concepts and make you are feeling comfy onstage.”
Thinking in regards to the day’s journey, Harding mentioned he noticed similarities between conducting and flying: They each demand deep consciousness and a capability to step again.
“Nobody needs to hearken to a live performance — or be on a airplane — when the chief is on high-voltage rigidity from starting to finish,” he mentioned. “You must be taught to breathe.”
“We stored everybody secure this morning: That mission is completed,” he added. “Now it’s time for an incredible live performance.”
Then he picked up his baton, adjusted his bow tie and headed for the stage.
