On a stormy day more than 34,000 feet above Paris, Air France Flight 1205 prepared to make its descent. Flight attendants began checking seat backs and tray tables, and passengers groggily emerged from naps.
Then a voice from the cockpit came over the intercom, offering 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 flight’s first officer. “And remember: Rehearsal is at 6 p.m.”
The cabin erupted into whistles and cheers. Harding, 49, an Air France pilot, also happens to be one of the world’s top orchestral conductors. And on this December day, he was flying his ensemble, the esteemed Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, from its home base in Rome to Paris for the start of a European tour. (A few dozen unknowing members of the public were also aboard.)
Over the past few years, the British-born Harding has led dual, and often dueling, careers: conducting Mozart and Mahler symphonies one day, piloting commercial flights to Paris, Milan, Stockholm and Tunis the next. He relishes the exacting regimen of flying — checking fuel figures, analyzing weather patterns, tallying passengers and cargo. He is also energized by the risks he can take in music.
“In flying, we have to identify all the threats and make sure we don’t go anywhere near them,” he said. “In music, it’s the opposite: We have to get as close as we can to catastrophe.”
Harding is a rarity in commercial flying: a pilot with a thriving artistic career. And in the high-pressure, all-consuming classical music field, where stars are often expected to show absolute devotion to their craft, he is an outlier, showing there can be life beyond the concert hall.
“I don’t think it’s realistic to say just because you love something, you should do it 24 hours a day, every single day,” he said. “I just don’t think that’s human.”
The renowned conductor Simon Rattle, who first met Harding when he was a sandy-haired 16-year-old conducting prodigy, said he had become “one of the great ones” who could tackle almost any piece with any orchestra.
“Flying has given him a center, a balance to his music,” Rattle said. “It has made him a better musician and a much calmer person.”
IN THE COCKPIT that December day, Harding was focused, a cup of coffee by his side. He was still getting to know the Santa Cecilia orchestra, Italy’s unofficial national symphony since 1908, and he had proposed the flight to usher in his tenure, which began in October.
Now he had to perform for his musicians. He worried about the landing.
“If I bang the plane down hard today,” he said, “they’re going to talk about it for the next 20 years.”
In the cabin, the musicians cheered their leader on. They joked about what to call him. Maestro? Pilot? Captain? They passed the two-hour journey with some music, singing a rendition of “Volare.” At one point, the clarinetist Alessandro Carbonare performed an excerpt from Puccini’s “Tosca” from his seat in row 19.
When Carbonare told his mother that Harding was flying the orchestra to Paris, she did not believe him.
“Nobody can imagine it,” he said, “a conductor who also flies. I just hope we arrive safely in Paris. That will be enough.”
As the plane descended, Harding invited Santa Cecilia’s concert master and its assistant conductor into the cockpit to watch the landing. In the cabin, there was nervous laughter when the plane encountered turbulence.
As the Paris skyline came into view, a flight attendant chimed in over the intercom: “Prepare for maestro landing.”
HARDING WAS BORN in Oxford, England, to a lecturer in engineering and a university administrator, who were amateur musicians. He began playing trumpet at 8, after hearing a Christmas performance of Handel’s “Messiah.” At home, he also dabbled in conducting, moving his arms along to recordings 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 the 37-year-old music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, a letter describing his preternatural skill at leading Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” at school. Rattle invited Harding and his classmates to Birmingham to work on the piece.
“It was kind of astonishing,” Rattle recalled. He took Harding under his wing, hiring him as an assistant and feeding him a steady diet of ham sandwiches.
Harding rose in classical music with staggering speed. At 17, he conducted bits of a rehearsal in Birmingham as Rattle looked on. At 19, he landed a dream gig as an assistant to Claudio Abbado, then the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, who had inspired 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 seems utterly absurd now,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t understand how far away from my own competence it was. If I had any perspective, I would have been paralyzed by fear.”
Abbado, who took to calling his protégé “my little genius,” taught Harding to make himself superfluous to the orchestra, so the musicians would feel more free to experiment.
“He was always trying to take himself out of the machinery,” Harding recalled.
Harding went on to vaunted posts atop the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre de Paris. He played an important role in shaping the renowned Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which Abbado started in 1997, leading the ensemble for eight years.
But there were also challenges. He struggled to find a music directorship in the United States, after some tense appearances there early in his career. Some musicians found him arrogant and aloof, and they were irked by his habit of speaking at length from the podium. (“I come and just talk, talk, talk,” Harding later said, “and that’s just not how it works here.”)
When Harding was in his mid-30s, he hired a conducting coach, hoping to hone his communication style and technique. (Harding never studied at a conservatory.) Around the same time, he went through a divorce that he has said left him “unfocused and indecisive.”
Harding kept up a busy performance schedule. But as he approached his 40th birthday, he mused on his interests outside classical music. He challenged himself to train as a pilot, thinking he had earned the luxury of “taking a little time, just for me, to learn something.”
He had been fascinated by flying since he was a child, when he played with a flight simulator on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer. He flew on a small plane for the first time as a teenager at the invitation of an orchestra musician in Birmingham. During that flight, he said, he fell in love with the “sensations and beauty of flying.”
In 2014, for his birthday challenge, Harding enrolled in a flight school in southern France. In his down time between concerts and rehearsals, he studied topics like aerodynamics and aviation law. At one point, he installed a flight simulator in his basement. After a few years, he earned his private and commercial pilot’s licenses, as well as certification to fly the Airbus A320.
To get the Air France job, he undertook a series of exams, interviews and psychometric evaluations. He pointed to his experience in music to reassure the airline that he would work well with colleagues.
“Being a conductor,” he said, “it the ultimate team activity.”
HARDING NOW SPENDS ABOUT a week each month flying medium-haul flights for Air France in Europe and North Africa, scheduled around his performances. (He has piloted hundreds of flights and accrued about 1,300 flight hours since joining the airline in 2021.) The arrangement has mostly worked, though he has at times canceled flying engagements at the last minute to substitute for ailing conductors.
Air France has counted Olympic athletes, astronauts and doctors in its ranks of pilots over the years — but no other conductors.
The airline said in a statement that it liked to support employees with special talents by granting flexibility in scheduling. Harding was trained to meet “the same high standards to ensure the highest level of flight safety,” a spokesman for Air France added.
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 from the radio.
Delille, who now flies regularly with Harding, said the conductor has a passion for difficult routes — those with mountains, short runways and volcanoes.
“He lives for the adventure,” Delille said.
WHEN FLIGHT 1205 touched down in Paris around noon, the Santa Cecilia musicians applauded and shouted “Bravo!” As they disembarked, Harding, in a trim navy uniform with gold braids, greeted each one, offering handshakes and hugs. Some players snapped selfies.
“It’s the first time I’ve heard of a man flying a plane in the morning and conducting a concert in the evening,” the violinist Leonardo Micucci told him.
Harding said he was pleased it had been a smooth flight and that the landing was gentle.
“There was temptation for a little emotion,” he said. “But I managed to put that aside. The emotion is for this evening.”
In the afternoon, Harding returned to his Paris apartment to see his family and to take a one-hour nap. Then, around 5 p.m., in a sweatshirt and jeans, he headed to the Philharmonie de Paris concert hall for a rehearsal ahead of that evening’s performance of Debussy, Brahms and Prokofiev.
In his dressing room, stocked with bananas, lemons, nuts and cookies, he looked over his scores and conferred with the evening’s soloist, the violinist Lisa Batiashvili. She described Harding as a “real pilot” on the podium.
“He is extremely flexible,” she said, “and extremely ready to receive your ideas and make you feel comfortable onstage.”
Thinking about the day’s journey, Harding said he saw similarities between conducting and flying: They both demand deep awareness and an ability to step back.
“Nobody wants to listen to a concert — or be on a plane — when the leader is on high-voltage tension from beginning to end,” he said. “You have to learn to breathe.”
“We kept everyone safe this morning: That mission is accomplished,” he added. “Now it’s time for a great concert.”
Then he picked up his baton, adjusted his bow tie and headed for the stage.
