On a stormy day more than 34,000 feet above Paris, Air France Flight 1205 prepared for descent. The flight attendants began checking the back seats and tray tables, and the passengers were rudely ejected.
Then came a voice from the cockpit over the intercom, giving an update on the weather (cloudy and 54 degrees) and the remaining flight time (about 30 minutes).
“Thank you for choosing Air France,” said Daniel Harding, the airline’s chief executive officer. “And remember: Practice is at 6pm”
The cabin erupted in whistles and cheers. Harding, 49, an Air France pilot, is one of the world’s leading orchestral conductors. And on this December day, he was driving his entire band, the prestigious Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, from his home base in Rome to Paris for the start of a European tour. (A number of unidentified members of the public were also present.)
For the past few years, the British-born Harding has led two, and often competing, jobs: conducting Mozart and Mahler symphonies one day, piloting commercial flights to Paris, Milan, Stockholm and Tunis the next. He enjoys the precise nature of flying – checking fuel statistics, analyzing weather conditions, counting passengers and cargo. He is also inspired by the risks he can take in music.
“During the flight, we have to identify all the threats and make sure we don’t get anywhere,” he said. “In music, it’s the opposite: We have to get as close as possible to making a disaster.”
Harding is a rarity in commercial aviation: a pilot with a successful career. And in the high-pressure, all-consuming world of classical music, where stars are often expected to show complete dedication to their craft, he is an outsider, showing that there can be life beyond the concert hall.
“I don’t think it makes sense to say just because you love something, you have to do it 24 hours a day, every day,” he said. “I just don’t think that’s the person.”
Famed conductor Simon Rattle, who first met Harding as a sandy-haired 16-year-old prodigy, said he had become “one of the greats” who could play with almost any orchestra.
“Flying gave him a center, a balance in his music,” Rattle said. “It made him a better musician and a calmer person.”
IN THE PROCESS on that December day, Harding was focused, a cup of coffee by his side. He was familiarizing himself with the orchestra of Santa Cecilia, Italy’s unofficial national symphony since 1908, and had boarded a plane to begin his performance, which began in October.
Now he had to sing his songs. He was worried about coming.
He said: “If I crash a plane today, they will talk about it for the next 20 years.”
At home, the musicians cheered for their leader. They discussed what they would call him. The Maestro? A pilot? Captain? They passed the two-hour journey with some music, singing the song “Volare.” At one point, clarinetist Alessandro Carbonare made a quote from Puccini’s “Tosca” from his seat in the 19th row.
When Carbonare told his mother that Harding was conducting an orchestra in Paris, she did not believe him.
“No one can imagine,” he said, “the conductor is also flying.” I just hope we get to Paris safely. That will be enough.”
As the plane descended, Harding invited Santa Cecilia’s concertmaster and assistant conductor into the staff room to observe the landing. In the house, there was nervous laughter as the plane encountered turbulence.
When the light of the Paris sky appeared, the flight attendant came in through the intercom: “Prepare for the arrival of the maestro.”
HARDING WAS BORN in Oxford, England, to an engineering lecturer and a university dean, who were novice musicians. He started playing the trumpet at the age of 8, after hearing Handel’s “Messiah” Christmas performance. At home, he also dabbled in conducting, moving his arms to the score of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. At 13, he enrolled at Chetham’s School of Music, a boarding school in Manchester.
When Harding was 17, a teacher sent Rattle, then music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, a letter describing his preternatural ability to conduct Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” at school. Rattle invited Harding and his classmates to Birmingham to work on the piece.
“It was amazing,” Rattle recalled. He took Harding under his wing, hiring him as an assistant and feeding him a steady diet of ham sandwiches.
Harding rose through the ranks of classical music at an astonishing rate. At the age of 17, he auditioned in Birmingham as Rattle watched. At the age of 19, he got a dream gig as an assistant to Claudio Abbado, then the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, who had inspired him to become a conductor. At the age of 21, he made his debut with that orchestra, and at the age of 22, he signed his first recording contract.
“It all seems so absurd now,” he said. “At that time I did not understand how far it was from my ability. If I had a vision, I would be free from fear.”
Abbado, who began referring to his patron as “my little genius,” taught Harding to pretend to be beyond the orchestra’s ability, so the musicians would feel more comfortable experimenting.
“He was always trying to get himself out of the machine,” Harding recalled.
Harding went on to hold senior positions in the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Orchester de Paris. He played an important role in shaping the famous Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which Abbado started in 1997, leading the group for eight years.
But there were also challenges. He struggled to find a musical director in the United States, after a rough appearance there early in his career. Other musicians found him arrogant and inattentive, and were annoyed by his habit of speaking for long periods of time on stage. (“I’m just coming to talk, talk, talk,” Harding said later, “and that’s just not how it works here.”)
When Harding was in his mid-30s, he hired a running coach, hoping to hone his communication and technique. (Harding did not attend daycare.) At the same time, she went through a divorce that she says left her “unfocused and indecisive.”
Harding kept a busy work schedule. But as he approached his 40th birthday, he thought about his hobbies outside of classical music. He challenged himself to train as a pilot, thinking he had gained the luxury of “just taking a little while, so I could learn something.”
He had been interested in flying since he was a child, when he played with the flight simulator on his Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer. He flew in a small plane for the first time as a child at the invitation of an orchestra player in Birmingham. During that flight, he said, he fell in love with “the feelings and the beauty of flying.”
In 2014, because of his birth challenge, Harding enrolled in a flight school in the south of France. In his down time between concerts and rehearsals, he studied subjects such as aerodynamics and aviation law. At one point, he installed a flight simulator in his basement. A few years later, he received his private and commercial pilot’s licenses, as well as a certificate to fly the Airbus A320.
In order to get a job with Air France, he underwent a series of tests, interviews and psychological tests. He revealed his musical background to assure the airline that he would work well with his colleagues.
He said: “Being a conductor, it’s a big team job.”
HARDING IS NOW SPENDING ABOUT IT every week every month flying medium-haul flights of Air France in Europe and North Africa, is scheduled for its operation. (He has flown hundreds of flights and accumulated nearly 1,300 flight hours since joining the airline in 2021.) The plan has worked well, though he has sometimes canceled flights at the last minute to fill in for sick conductors.
Air France has counted Olympic athletes, astronauts and doctors on its pilot list over the years – but no other operators.
The airline said in a statement that it would like to support workers with special skills by offering scheduling flexibility. Harding was trained to meet “the same high standards to ensure the highest level of safety on board,” added an Air France spokesman.
When Lucien Delille, a classical music fan who also works as an Air France pilot, heard that Harding was working for the airline, he was surprised. He recognized Harding’s name on the radio.
Delille, who flies regularly with Harding, said the conductor has a passion for difficult routes – those with mountains, short runways and volcanoes.
“He lives to have fun,” said Delille.
WHERE FLIGHT 1205 When it was touched in Paris at noon, the musicians of Santa Cecilia clapped their hands and shouted “Bravo!” As they disembarked, Harding, dressed in a navy uniform decorated with gold braid, greeted each one, shook hands and hugged. Some players took selfies.
“It was the first time I heard of a man who flies a plane in the morning and conducts a concert in the evening,” said violinist Leonardo Micucci.
Harding said he was happy that the flight was going well and the landing was good.
“There was a little emotional temptation,” he said. “But I was able to put that aside. The mood is for tonight. “
In the afternoon, Harding returned to his apartment in Paris to see his family and take a one-hour nap. At around 17:00, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, he headed to the Philharmonie de Paris concert hall to rehearse before an evening performance of Debussy, Brahms and Prokofiev.
In her dressing room, stocked with bananas, lemons, nuts and cookies, she checked her notes and chatted with the evening’s soloist, violinist Lisa Batiashvili. He described Harding as a “real aviator” on the podium.
“He’s very flexible,” she said, “and he’s very receptive to your ideas and makes you feel comfortable on stage.”
Reflecting on the day’s journey, Harding said he saw a parallel between driving and flying: Both require acute awareness and the ability to reverse.
“No one wants to listen to a concert – or be on a plane – when the leader is struggling from start to finish,” he said. “You have to learn to breathe.”
“We kept everyone safe this morning: That mission has been accomplished,” he added. “Now it’s time for a great concert.”
Then he took his cane, adjusted his tie and went to the stage.
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