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FIFAworldcup.com |
30 June 2006 |
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A feeling of friendship between rival fans
Daniel Harding is a young British conductor, who has leapt to prominence under Simon Rattle and has been music director of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. He conducted Cosi fan tutte at the Aix Festival in 2005 and is appearing again in 2006. He is conducting the orchestra of La Scala, Milan in 2006. In 2004, he was also appointed principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. He is scheduled to assume the post of Principal Conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in late 2006.
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How did you find the Argentina-Germany match that you saw from the stands? |
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It is the first time for me to come to the World Cup, this is the first time I saw any competitive international game live, it is a big occasion for me. And everybody talks about the World Cup as this great party and this great thing that brings together people from the whole planet. You wonder what its going to feel like to be there and experience it yourself. It's true, there is a fantastic feeling of festival and enjoyment, almost exclusively a feeling of friendship between rival fans.
You sit in an area with many Argentineans, many Germans and also many foreigners who are from neither side, like us, and it's a great atmosphere.
It's clear from many people that how the Germans have played has been a surprise, not only that they played so well but also their style of play, unusual for the classic German team. I think to see Germany-Argentina this year is a fantastic choice. Everybody I told that I would see this game, they were insanely jealous. The only sad thing for me was when the Argentinean goalkeeper was injured. I don't think anyone pretends to be injured and come off the field on a stretcher in a World Cup quarter-final. There is a moment where you think somebody is wasting time and then you whistle. But when you realise that it's serious, I found it a bit too much. |
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Do you think these two teams could have been in the final? |
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| I think whoever won this game, and I am sorry to say, but Germany has a very good chance of being in the final. These two teams, on the form they've shown, they could have easily met in the final, if it was another way. Once you get to the knock-out stage, it's always going to have this tension that nobody dares to make a mistake because it's so final. I'm sorry to say because of the penalties, but it is great to see a game where you don't know until the last minute who can win. I think there will be other games where somebody wins 2-0, 3-0, 4-0, you know from 20 minutes in what is going to happen. And today was fantastic tension right until the end. |
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Who was your Man of the Match? |
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| At the half-time, I thought it had to be Tevez, I thought he was fantastic. At the end, it is difficult to say. I think Sorin was great, Tevez and Riquelme, they did things that were just incredible to see. And I am biased, but I didn't see any of that play from any of the Germans. But the Germans, they have of course a wonderful determination in front of their home fans. Today was maybe not the most flowing attacking game from either side that we have seen, but still, for a German team to play like this is extraordinary. |
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At this stage of the tournament, what is your prediction for the Final? |
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| Before the World Cup started I said Brazil will beat Germany 2-0 in the final and I think it is still quite possible. Italy can be difficult for Germany, as we expect to win tonight. People underestimate Italians and how clever they are, and they are a difficult team for anybody to play. I just have a feeling that Germany will get there. And I don't see who will stop Brazil. You know maybe tomorrow they will lose. But you know, if they want to, if they want to play, I mean who's going to stop them? Zidane maybe is not the same as he was four years ago, but I mean he looked great the other night, so you can't say. But I would be surprised if France beat Brazil, but it would be an exciting surprise. This is what the World Cup is about, right? |
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Today you took a stroll in Berlin. How was the atmosphere in town? |
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I was with my brother and we were walking around the street and we were saying if we were in London today and England were playing Argentina, it would be much more crazy. What was bizarre was million fans on this fan mile but then you walk in the Tiergarten and its perfectly normal and you go 20 metres further and there are a million people. And it's somehow strange. There's absolute football fever and sometimes a bit of calm.
I was in Munich the other day, changing aeroplanes and I had time to go to the Fanfest at the airport. A huge screen and everyone was drinking beer. I think the Germans have done a great job to make this atmosphere and the feeling that the World Cup is very friendly. But it was fantastic just to be here. It is passionate. It is not really sanitized, but at the same time everybody feels welcome. It's the most natural thing. |
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The Times |
17 February 2006 |
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What won't Dan dare?
After La Scala, Covent Garden holds no fears for Daniel Harding
The stage-door staff at Covent Garden don't recognise him. Nor, it seems, does the man from the Royal Opera press office. A slightly awkward moment, because this callow-looking kid is about to conduct the Royal Opera in Berg's Wozzeck. And also because, after winning thunderous acclaim for rescuing the first night of La Scala's season, the 30-year-old Daniel Harding is suddenly one of the hottest properties in classical music.
But the doormen might be forgiven. Harding is not exactly a prophet without honour in his own land, but he certainly conducts far more often on the Continent, particularly with his outstanding Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Indeed, until recently he and his wife Beatrice (a French-German viola player in the Mahler CO) were bringing up their small son in Paris. "It's funny coming back to London, because I really don't know much about how things work here," he says.
That's a little disingenuous because Harding's career is run by the most powerful classical-music agent in Britain. And in any case, it's all about to change. The London Symphony Orchestra, a band that used to eat young conductors for breakfast, has invested so much faith and hope in Harding that it has appointed him principal guest conductor, starting next season. With the LSO's new principal conductor, Valery Gergiev, a somewhat unpredictable asset, the orchestra will be looking to Harding not just to put in a lot of hours on the podium (ten programmes a season, plus tours), but also to supply fresh thinking about repertoire. He is unlikely to disappoint. "My first concert after the appointment starts is of Rameau dances and Mahler Seven," he grins.
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Harding is certainly unpretentious. His online blog, at www.danielharding.com, is at its most profound when discussing his beloved Manchester United. But he's not naive. For one thing, he's been around a long time. The Times first reviewed him in 1993, when the Chetham's schoolboy was just 17, befriended by Simon Rattle and given the chance to conduct premieres with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. (We predicted big things, thank goodness.) He started a music degree at Cambridge, but dropped out when Claudio Abbado offered him a job as his assistant in Berlin. Then came a series of startling debuts. He was the youngest person to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic, and the youngest (at 21) to conduct a Prom. Since then, he has conducted more than 50 orchestras around the world, including the Vienna Philharmonic and, last year, the Chicago Symphony.
"Rehearsing an orchestra for the first time is the single most unpleasant thing a conductor has to do," he declares. Because you feel ruthlessly scrutinised by the players? "No, not even that," Harding says. "Players can be incredibly welcoming, but you still have to work them out. They all know each other; you feel like a complete outsider." And never more so, presumably, than when Harding was invited at short notice to Milan in December.
Even in normal years the first night of the La Scala season is one of the opera world's grandest glamfests. And last year was far from normal. After two decades at the helm, the immensely haughty Italian conductor Riccardo Muti had quit La Scala in far from convivial circumstances. His legion of fans were baying for blood. Some pundits were predicting a mutiny of disgruntled Mutisti as the curtain rose on the new season. "I had so many people sit me down quietly and warning me about what was going to happen," Harding says.
Their gloom proved unfounded. Harding won cheers. He thinks the fraught circumstances actually worked in his favour. "The company has been through a lot of turmoil, but I was given no bulls*** at all. It seemed that everybody had only one thing on their minds: to do a great job. What's more, the orchestral musicians had a huge amount to prove because they were very publicly involved in Muti's departure. So they felt that people were saying: 'OK, you made trouble for the great maestro. Now let's see how you play without him'."
So does Harding now want, or expect, La Scala to offer him the job as Muti's permanent replacement? The question seems to cover him in confusion, though he must have known it was coming. "Er, I hope I'll still be conducting for another 40 or 50 years...and I hope a job like that would be a possibility one day, and...well, whoever gets that job is going to be a very lucky person, and..."
Let's just leave it at that, I suggest. Harding nods gratefully.
After the La Scala experience, conducting Berg's bleak and harrowing Wozzeck at Covent Garden should be a doddle. And Harding certainly ought to know the score. "I rehearsed it for 90 hours over six weeks in 2003 in Aix-en-Provence, then the festival was cancelled because of the French theatre strike. Last year we did one concert performance in Turin. And I also did two concert performances with the Bavarian Radio Symphony, who asked for 15 rehearsals. So I've done an awful lot of preparation of Wozzeck for very few performances."
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Is it the greatest 20th-century opera? "Probably. Put it this way: I can't think of one with a higher claim. Actually, the piece it most reminds me of is the St Matthew Passion. Everywhere you look, there are hidden meanings conveyed with incredible mathematical genius and perfectly integrated into the drama. Berg himself talked about the 'ecstasies of logic'. That's why I like the comparison with Bach, who did very similar things.
"On the other hand, the piece also reminds me more and more of Fledermaus or Rosenkavalier because it's so Viennese. It's virtually a whole New Year's Day concert of waltzes, polkas and marches. And there's also something very Viennese about the way that grotesque things happen on stage while a nice waltz is being played. It's a piece with a lot of black humour, and I think we've got a cast who can bring that out."
Richard Morrison
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About the House |
September 2005 |
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The return of the native
Francis Carlin tracks down conducting Daniel Harding to Aix and finds a young man at ease with his talent who's looking forward to his first staged 'Wozzeck' at the Royal Opera House
It's the morning after the first night of Daniel Harding's Così fan tutte at the Aix-en-Provence Festival and I'm approaching the villa the conductor has rented in a residential area.
Suddenly, from the hotel next door, a noisy convoy of police cars sweeps out, sirens blaring, to accompany the former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to her next port of call. Albright, it turns out, has been attending Così along with other dignitaries.
The mood in the Harding villa is light years away from this protocol: his French wife Béatrice, pregnant with their second child, is splashing around in the swimming pool, and Harding himself is busily scrutinizing a new-fangled device for information about transfer fees for footballers. Can this be the conducting prodigy who hobnobs with Sir Simon Rattle – who described him as having a 'staggering,natural physical gift' – and iconic theatre directors like Peter Brook, Luc Bondy and now Patrice Chéreau who produced this Così, and whom Claudio Abbado called 'my little genius'? You can't help wondering if Harding, an enthusiastic supporter of Manchester United, talks soccer to them at rehearsal pauses, suggesting perhaps to Chéreau that Fiordiligi should dribble past Dorabella before making a pass to or at Ferrando.
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Now 29, Harding is a little mature for the Wunderkind label but he actually looks much younger. And he's still clocking up the eye-catching achievements, the latest being his appointment as Principal Guest Conductor to the London Symphony Orchestra, the reason for his move back to England after living in Germany and France. In Aix, there were reports of another coup: Stéphane Lissner, Festival Director and newly appointed Artistic Director of La Scala, had booked him to open the season in Milan on 7 December with an Idomeneo produced by Luc Bondy. Harding is cautious – 'We're all planning to do it but we haven't sorted out the cast yet' – but it will doubtless be another statistical record to go with becoming Rattle's assistant in Birmingham at 17, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic at 21, appearing as the youngest conductor at the Proms in 1996 and being appointed the first Music Director of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
This modern fairy-tale started at specialist music school Chetham's in Manchester. As Harding talks, his apparent shyness wears off to reveal a dry sense of humour and some plain-speaking modesty. He comes from Oxford; his father, an engineering science don, plays the viola and his mother started a wind band for 'people who are too old to play in youth orchestra and too bad to play in amateur orchestra.'
He then underplays a much-reported anecdote about a Pierrot lunaire tape that he and other pupils at Chetham's sent to Rattle in Birmingham all those years ago. 'We didn't send the tape cold. We got our composition teacher to write to him saying the kids are doing this and would he consider giving them a bit of encouragement? Rattle invited me, the pianist and the singer down and so we made a tape to show him where we'd got with the piece. Rattle listened and then told us, "That's great. I just did this piece last week with members of the Berlin Phil and the tape you've played me is actually more accurate. This is very good." We were very proud, but then he added, "However, you don't actually understand a thing."' But Rattle still agreed to give Harding a crash course in Expressionism and let him conduct some Pierrot rehearsals in Birmingham. Soon – this was 1994 – Harding was making his professional debut with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
Rattle, it seems, is Harding's spiritual guide, Abbado the reason why he wanted to become a conductor. Rattle showed moral integrity by sticking with Birmingham to raise the orchestra's standards when offers were flooding in from richer and more prestigious cities. And his interest in budding talents, as Harding points out, is principled, too: 'There are some who sponsor competitions, but Simon's is a healthy way. He doesn't use any self-aggrandizement; doesn't put his name in lights. He doesn't do public master classes where he can show the audience how much he knows. He just finds someone he thinks is serious and not a cocky little shit.' But isn't being a 'cocky little shit' [CLS] normal for an ambitious conductor, I ask? 'There are different levels of CLS. Of course, you have to have amazing self-confidence to be able to stand up there and do a job. I think self-confidence really works when it come from a natural ability; and a realistic knowledge that you're able to do it. At the same time, when you're not doing it, you have to be able to question everything very strongly. Conducting is one of those professions that attracts the people who are taken in by all the peripheral stuff. Being in the footlights, for example.'
So what did Rattle mean exactly by 'staggering, natural physical gift'? 'People forget that conducting in the end is to a large extent a physical discipline. It's a skill. Just because you're a great musician and you love the Chopin Ballades doesn't mean that you can then play them. In the same way, just because you're a great pianist and you want to conduct the Mahler Fifth isn't enough. On the other hand, the best conductors aren't always those with the best physical technique. Harnoncourt doesn't have a staggering, natural physical gift, I mean to show really clearly what's going on. Carlos Kleiber, on the other hand, is the obvious example of the ultimate for conductors. There's nothing like him. If I could be one or the other, it would be a hard choice. Harnoncourt is for me a legendary musician who changed the world and got it all to happen through the force of his will.'
Harding has spied the heading 'Deep End' on my notes so isn't surprised when I ask him whether his career to date has been a series of pinnacles that he scaled because his youth made him blind to the immensity of the events. 'Definitely at the beginning, first time in front of the CBSO or conducting the Berlin Philharmonic when I was just 21, it was just "Wow!" And I totally remember having no fear of anything, it was just so amazing. It was, "Do you want to play with this orchestra?" "Oh, yeah!" It was later on in 1997/98 that I went through a couple of years where I couldn't walk on stage without feeling I was going to be sick. It suddenly hit me; I felt the pressure of it all. For Jenůfa at Welsh National Opera, I found it really hard to go out into the pit – I felt so overwhelmed by it all.'
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Reassured by Rattle that he, too, had gone through the same crisis, Harding plunged into another deep end with the Don Giovanni directed by Peter Brook in 1998 that also marked the beginning of Lissner's tenure in Aix. 'Actually, to be fair, it was really the shallow end because I got three months with Brook. I met him in a Paris café and told him I didn't want to do Don Giovanni, it was too big a deal, but he stressed the long rehearsal period, the young singers and said we'd just take it slowly.'
The result was a triumph and, as a result, most French people associate Harding with France and opera. Wrong on both counts. 'I hardly ever conduct opera!' Harding protests and goes on to say that he's probably better known in Germany because he worked as Abbado's assistant in Berlin and was Music Director of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen for six years. 'OK, I do Aix which is high profile, have a contract with a record company (Virgin Classics) based in France so France has been important. Italy is more intense because of the Abbado connection so I get the Abbado fan club turning up. But I sell more records in Germany than anywhere else. If you look at hits on the website, and recording sales, general interest in me is lowest in Britain.'
That should change with the LSO job. As for opera, it may have been a minority interest for Harding but he's always been spoilt, working 'with the best directors'. Aix in particular has offered dream conditions. Harding is more a collaborator than a dictator on the podium – 'as long as people understand that I'm making the decisions' – but he's more flexible when it comes to standing an opera: 'I get along with directors because I don't come in and say this is how it's going to be musically. If Patrice [Chéreau] asks me what I think about a speed months before, I tell him it's impossible to decide before coming together in rehearsal. Every decision on tempos affects the character, and the character is his domain. My whole understanding of Così is hugely influenced by Chéreau's ideas. Everything he has to say about the text influences and deepens my understanding.'
Reaction to Harding's conducting of Britten's Turn of the Screw, both the Deborah Warner staging for the Royal Opera House and Luc Bondy's production for Aix, was unanimously positive. When Bondy's Turn of the Screw turned up in Paris last June, I marvelled at his easy fusion of analysis, tension and warm instrumental playing in a score that can easily sound ugly in the wrong hands. The verdicts on his Aix Così were, however, generally unfavourable, as if Harding had sacrificed the music's flow to Chéreau unquiet, pessimistic dramaturgy. When he conducted a revival of Peter Mussbach's controversial staging of La traviata in 2004, he came under attack, too; 'I looked at Verdi from the historical performance side, not just what he's become. We used the new critical edition and we played softly when it said pp and not ff. There are some terrible traditions. It was an experiment but I think by playing certain bits without vibrato we brought off a "pure sadness" that you don't normally get. We got ripped to shit! It was like people had come expecting to eat cake and we gave them sushi. This is where you have to have the self-confidence. I know we did lots of interesting things. I know we were on to something. I know what was wrong with it and I know what was right with it.'
Thorough preparation, along with intellectual rigour and musical scholarship, are a must for Harding, so how will he cope with Wozzeck next year at the Royal Opera House – a revival involving fewer rehearsals? 'I'll have ten orchestral rehearsals compared to the 13 I had for a concert performance in Munich, which I didn't think was quite enough. However, British orchestras are ferociously quick and if you sort something out once you don't have to sort it out again. On the other hand, you can start the first day with a British orchestra and get absolutely everything accurate and it can be very difficult to go beyond that.'
Wozzeck is a key work for Harding and this will be his first staged version. He spent six weeks in 2003 rehearsing a production with Stéphane Braunschweig in Aix but strikes prevented any performance. 'It's my second favourite piece of music after the St Matthew Passion. I've known it since I was 14 and it's always been why I want to be a conductor. You can cut an aria or a recitative from other words with greater or lesser damage but you can't touch a thing with Wozzeck. It's the most compact, perfect work and couldn't be a note shorter or longer. There's every kind of character and I love the fact it's so Viennese: it's like listening to Fledermaus but all gone horribly, horribly wrong. You've got the whole New Year's Concert in there, waltzes and polkas. The worse moments and the meanest things are sung to the most charming music. It's very Austrian. There's something vicious about that.'
I take this to mean his reading will be warmly post-Mahlerian rather than coldly analytical. 'Neither; certainly not coldly analytical because there's sympathy in it, but I also think it's wrong to take the edges off it and make it all sound beautiful and less scary. I do try to look for the Viennese character because it's so much part of the language of the piece and provides the subtexts. What abbado had which blows my mind was such incredible tension and brutality while managing to stay relaxed in the production of the sound, in the use of rubato.'
Harding's operatic future is not entirely his own choosing because opera is too complicated a venture: 'Sometimes, these decisions take on a life of their own in opera. I obviously have more control over what I do in concerts. There's no way the opera repertoire I'll be doing over the next five years reflects exactly what I'd like to be doing because there are so many factors involved.' There will be lots of Mozart and he will be testing Richard Strauss with a concert version of Elektra. Given his current pace, I rib him by asking when he expects to storm Bayreuth but all I can get out of him is, 'Ah, yes, Wagner. I have a little pet project which will take some time.'
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And then he's off to lunch in the hotel Madeleine Albright has just vacated. He's still the leader of the brat pack, the instigator of a British trend which has since produced young conductors Edward Gardner and Robin Ticcati, who, as Harding did, will shortly be taking up his first post in Sweden. This reminds me to ask Harding, as a parting short, if he ever feels like the musical equivalent of Björn Borg who inspired a generation of talented Swedish tennis players. He looks at me despairingly: 'Didn't he end up selling clothes?'
Francis Carlin
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