On a stormy day greater than 34,000 toes above Paris, Air France Flight 1205 was getting ready to descend. Flight attendants started checking seat backs and tray tables, and passengers emerged groggy from a nap.
Then a cockpit voice came to visit the intercom providing an replace on the climate (cloudy and 54 levels) and the remaining flight time (about half-hour).
“Thanks for selecting Air France,” mentioned Daniel Harding, Flight First Officer. “And bear in mind: rehearsal is at 6 p.m.”
The cabin erupted in boos and cheers. Harding, 49, an Air France pilot, can be one of many world’s high orchestral conductors. And on that December day he flew along with his ensemble, esteemed Orchestra of the National Academy of Santa Ceciliafrom his house base in Rome to Paris for the beginning of a European tour. (A number of dozen unsuspecting members of the general public had been additionally on board.)
For the previous few years, British-born Harding has led a twin and sometimes dueling profession: sooner or later conducting symphonies by Mozart and Mahler, the subsequent piloting business flights to Paris, Milan, Stockholm and Tunis. He enjoys the demanding mode of flying – checking the quantity of gas, analyzing the climate, counting passengers and cargo. He’s additionally energized by the dangers he can soak up music.
“In flying, we’ve to determine all threats and ensure we do not get near them,” he mentioned. “In music, it is the alternative: we’ve to get as shut as potential to the crash.”
Harding is a rarity in business aviation: a pilot with a thriving creative profession. And within the intense, all-consuming subject of classical music, the place stars are sometimes anticipated to point out absolute dedication to their craft, he’s extraordinary, exhibiting that there might be life outdoors the live performance corridor.
“I do not assume it is sensible to say that simply since you love one thing, you need to do it 24 hours a day, daily,” he mentioned. “I simply do not assume it is human.”
Well-known conductor Simon Rattle, who first met Harding when he was a sandy-haired 16-year-old conducting a miraclementioned he grew to become “one of many greats” who might deal with nearly any piece with any orchestra.
“Flying gave him a middle, a steadiness to his music,” Rattle mentioned. “It made him a greater musician and a a lot calmer individual.”
IN THE COCKPIT that December day, Harding was targeted with a cup of espresso by his facet. He was nonetheless attending to know Santa Cecilia’s orchestra, The unofficial national symphony of Italy since 1908 and he proposed the flight to start his time period, which started in October.
Now he needed to play for his musicians. He was anxious about touchdown.
“If I hit the aircraft onerous right this moment,” he mentioned, “they will be speaking about it for the subsequent 20 years.”
Within the sales space, the musicians applauded their chief. They had been joking about what to name it. Maestro? A pilot? Captain? They made it by means of the two-hour journey with little music, singing a rendition of ‘Volare’. At one level, clarinetist Alessandro Carbonare carried out an excerpt from Puccini’s Tosca from his seat within the nineteenth row.
When Carbonare informed his mom that Harding was going to fly the orchestra to Paris, she didn’t consider him.
“Nobody can think about him,” he mentioned, “a conductor who additionally flies.” I simply hope we arrive safely in Paris. That shall be sufficient.”
Because the aircraft descended, Harding invited Santa Cecilia’s concertmaster and his assistant conductor into the cockpit to look at the touchdown. There was nervous laughter within the cockpit because the aircraft encountered turbulence.
Because the skyline of Paris got here into view, the flight attendant known as over the intercom, “Put together for touchdown Maestro.”
HARDING IS BORN in Oxford, England, to an engineering lecturer and a college administrator who’re each beginner musicians. Started enjoying the trumpet at 8 after listening to a Christmas efficiency of Handel’s Messiah. At house, he additionally conducts, shifting his palms to recordings of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. At 13, he enrolled at Chetham’s College of Music, a boarding faculty in Manchester.
When Harding was 17, a trainer despatched Rattle, then 37-year-old music director of the Birmingham Metropolis Symphony Orchestra, a letter describing his preternatural potential to carry out Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire at college. Rattle invited Harding and his classmates to Birmingham to work on the piece.
“It was type of wonderful,” Rattle remembers. He took Harding underneath his wing, employed him as an assistant and fed him a gentle weight-reduction plan of ham sandwiches.
Harding rose by means of the ranks of classical music at an astonishing price. At 17, he held elements of a rehearsal in Birmingham whereas Rattle seemed on. At 19, he landed a dream gig as an assistant to Claudio Abbadothen chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, who impressed him to be a conductor. At 21 he made his debut with this orchestra, and at 22 he signed his first recording contract.
“All of it appears totally absurd now,” he mentioned. “I did not understand on the time how far outdoors my very own competence this was. If I had any perspective, I’d be paralyzed with concern.”
Abbadowho started calling his protégé “my little genius,” taught Harding to make himself superfluous to the orchestra in order that the musicians felt freer to experiment.
“He was at all times making an attempt to get out of the machine,” Harding recalled.
Harding went on to lauded posts with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Orchester de Paris. He was instrumental in shaping the famend Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which Abbado based in 1997, main the ensemble for eight years.
However there have been additionally challenges. He struggled to find a music director in the United Statesafter some tense performances there early in his profession. Some musicians discovered him conceited and reserved, and had been aggravated by his behavior of talking at size from the rostrum. (“I are available and I simply speak, speak, speak,” Harding later mentioned, “and that simply does not work right here.”)
When Harding was in his mid-30s, he employed a conducting coach, hoping to enhance his model and communication method. (Harding by no means studied at a conservatory.) Across the similar time, he went by means of a divorce that he says left him “unfocused and indecisive.”
Harding maintained a busy efficiency schedule. However as his fortieth birthday approached, he mirrored on his pursuits outdoors of classical music. He challenged himself to coach as a pilot, believing he had earned the luxurious of “taking slightly time, only for me, to be taught one thing.”
He has been fascinated by flying since he was a toddler when he performed with a flight simulator on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum house laptop. He flew in a small aircraft for the primary time as an adolescent on the invitation of a musician in an orchestra in Birmingham. Throughout that flight, he mentioned, he fell in love with “the sensations and the great thing about flying.”
In 2014, for his birthday problem, Harding enrolled in a flight faculty within the south of France. In his spare time between concert events and rehearsals, he studied topics similar to aerodynamics and aviation regulation. At one level, he put in a flight simulator in his basement. After just a few years, he obtained his non-public and business pilot’s licenses, in addition to a certificates to fly the Airbus A320.
To get a job at Air France, he undertook a sequence of exams, interviews and psychometric assessments. He pointed to his background in music to reassure the airline that he would work nicely along with his colleagues.
“Being a conductor,” he mentioned, “is the last word workforce exercise.”
HARDING NOW SPENDS APPROX week every month with Air France medium-haul flights in Europe and North Africa scheduled round his performances. (He has piloted lots of of flights and collected about 1,300 flight hours since becoming a member of the airline in 2021.) The association has largely labored, although he has typically canceled flying engagements on the final minute to fill in for sick conductors.
Through the years, Air France has included Olympic athletes, astronauts and docs amongst its pilots, however not different conductors.
The airline mentioned in a press release that it desires to assist staff with particular skills by offering schedule flexibility. Harding was educated to fulfill “the identical excessive requirements to make sure the very best degree of flight security,” an Air France spokesman added.
When Lucien Delil, 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 on the radio.
Delil, who now flies repeatedly with Harding, mentioned the conductor had a ardour for tough routes – these with mountains, brief runways and volcanoes.
“He lives for journey,” DeLille mentioned.
WHEN FLIGHT 1205 landed in Paris round midday, the Santa Cecilia musicians cheered and shouted “Bravo!” As they disembarked, Harding, in a crisp navy uniform with gold stripes, greeted each, providing handshakes and hugs. Some gamers took selfies.
“It is the primary time I’ve heard of a person who flies an airplane within the morning and conducts a live performance within the night,” violinist Leonardo Micucci informed him.
Harding mentioned he was happy that the flight was clean and that the touchdown was gentle.
“There was a temptation for a little bit of emotion,” he mentioned. “However I used to be in a position to put that apart. The emotion is for tonight.”
Within the afternoon, Harding returned to his house in Paris to see his household and take an hour’s nap. Then, round 5 p.m., in a sweatshirt and denims, he headed to the Paris Philharmonic live performance corridor for a rehearsal earlier than the performance tonight of Debussy, Brahms and Prokofiev.
In his dressing room, full of bananas, lemons, nuts and cookies, he reviewed his scores and chatted with the night’s soloist, violinist Lisa Batiashvili. She described Harding as a “actual pilot” on the rostrum.
“He is extraordinarily versatile,” she mentioned, “and intensely prepared to take your concepts and make you are feeling comfy on stage.”
Excited about the day’s journey, Harding mentioned he sees similarities between conducting and flying: Each require deep consciousness and the flexibility to step again.
“Nobody desires to take heed to a live performance – or be on a aircraft – when the chief is underneath excessive stress from begin to end,” he mentioned. “It’s a must to be taught to breathe.”
“We stored everybody protected this morning: that mission achieved,” he added. “Now it is time for a terrific live performance.”
He then picked up the baton, straightened his bow tie, and headed for the stage.
