The Los Angeles Philharmonic announced Tuesday that it has named Daniel Harding the orchestra’s 12th music director, ending three years of intense speculation over the orchestra’s future after Gustavo Dudamel leaves in August to head the New York Philharmonic.
Harding will begin a six-year contract for up to a dozen concerts a season, beginning in the fall of 2027, almost 30 years after the British prodigy made his U.S. debut conducting the L.A. Phil at the 1997 Ojai Festival. It was a nervous-making trial by fire that began as a nail-biter. But by the festival’s end, the wunderkind had excitingly found his way with the orchestra.
Harding has since become a favorite, if occasional, L.A. Phil guest conductor while rising to the top rungs of the international orchestral circuit, along with obtaining a commercial flying license and piloting, now and then, for Air France. He led a pair of superior Rachmaninoff programs in his belated debut at the Hollywood Bowl last summer shortly after one of Dudamel’s greatest Bowl performances ever, yet so won over the L.A. Phil musicians that he suddenly seemed a possible candidate to succeed Dudamel.
Like Dudamel, who began conducting student orchestras in Venezuela in his early teens, Harding was already making waves at a young age. He was born in Oxford, England, in 1975, and became assistant to Simon Rattle at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the unheard-of age of 17.
Harding has gone on to lead major orchestras in Scandinavia (including Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra), Germany (including Mahler Chamber Orchestra), Paris (Orchestre de Paris), Japan, China and currently Rome (National Academy of Santa Cecilia). It’s impossible to pin him down from his large and varied discography with music from early to recent, everything consistently played with clarity and audible pleasure. Yet at first glance, he may not seem to fit what has become a mold for an L.A. Phil music director.
The orchestra is famed for taking startling chances on charismatic, emerging but inexperienced conductors of exceptional talent who reached greatness and became dazzling stars over long tenures. Zubin Mehta and Gustavo Dudamel were both 26 when they began in 1962 and 2009, respectively. Esa-Pekka Salonen took the reins in 1992 at 34.
But the L.A. Phil has grown into a behemoth, serving a wider and more diverse community than any orchestra before it and with far greater innovation. That has led to questions about whether any single musician could take charge, let alone a rising young star. In fact, thanks to the L.A. Phil’s influence, many orchestras everywhere now compete for the latest wunderkind hoping to capitalize on the youth movement rather than slowly nurture a rare ability.
British conductor Daniel Harding has been chosen to replace Gustavo Dudamel as the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
While Harding, 50, retains a boyish mien, he is anything but flashy and conveys a British reserve on the podium. He once said in an interview that he was the kind of guy who could sit in a restaurant for 20 minutes without being noticed by a waiter. Yet when he stands in front of an orchestra, he has a look of wonder in his eyes and a seemingly effortless stick technique, his baton making everything almost naturally and magically fall into place.
He also remains avid to explore the unexpected, such as learning to fly, which he says he loves. “I wouldn’t want to come to L.A.,” he explained on a brief phone call from his home in Paris, “if I didn’t think it would be a challenge.”
L.A. Phil President and CEO Kim Noltemy said over the weekend in her office at Walt Disney Concert Hall that Harding was the overwhelming favorite of the orchestra players.
“The orchestra,” Noltemy explained, “believes in him as the ideal conductor who could take them to the next level.”
Still, Harding steps into a situation unlike any other. The orchestra’s vast ambition reaches into — and often reinvents — music education, pop music, film music, Latino culture, visual arts, theater, architecture, classical music, opera and avant-garde new music. It furthermore operates four extraordinary venues — Frank Gehry’s iconic Disney Hall, Inglewood’s Beckmen YOLA Center (home of Youth Orchestra L.A.), Hollywood Bowl and the Ford Theater.
To maintain such a vast ambition, the ensemble has assumed a large collection of leaders. Mehta, Salonen and Dudamel all hold honorary titles. The orchestra has also made Salonen creative director, which means he will lead the orchestra for up to six weeks a season, develop special projects and generally help mold its vision. Dudamel expects to return at least four weeks a season, and he, too, aims to continue his grand projects. A young conductor, Anna Handler, has been appointed conductor-in-residence.
The list goes on, with Thomas Wilkins leading the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, acclaimed specialists in early music, new music and jazz with two more to be appointed for Latin music and film music.
It hardly seems as though there is room for any kind of overreaching music director. Yet Harding will, indeed, become a full-fledged one, bringing his own ideas and projects as well as coalescing all the parts into a bigger picture.
And for this he may be uniquely qualified. It is not uncommon for an orchestra to say good riddance to an outgoing conductor, indicating it is time for something new and different. Yet Harding has been warmly welcomed by Salonen, Dudamel and Handler, all of whom know him well. One of the first things he conducted at Ojai was “Gnarly Buttons,” a clarinet concerto by the L.A. Phil’s longtime creative chair, John Adams.
He and Salonen go back decades. Both had been principal conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and also worked together on the summer Baltic Sea Festival that Salonen created with the orchestra. Harding and Dudamel, who have know each other for some 20 years, have another thing in common: As young conductors they were both taken under the wings of Rattle and the late Italian conductor Claudio Abbado, two of the most celebrated conductors of their time. Harding has also known Handler since she was a student in Berlin.
Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov and British conductor Daniel Harding after performing Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 2” on Aug. 19, 2025, at the Hollywood Bowl.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Harding’s own vision for L.A. will take time to develop, he says, but the fact that he will oversee a collaboration with colleagues he knows so well and admires is a big part of the attraction. He already has plans to take YOLA on tour in 2029, which will be the Frank Gehry centenary.
“It would be ludicrous to say that I’ve got any kind of grip on the complexity or contemporary life in L.A.,” Harding explains of his excitement for exploring new places and cultures (he is a pilot after all), “but the mixture of elsewhere and here is what makes things interesting and inspires you to do better things.
“I hope to bring what I know and marry all of that. I’ve been conducting for more than 30 years and there is a moment when you collect.”
For now, Harding will remain in Paris and continue at least through 2029 with Santa Cecilia — the orchestra, he delightedly notes, where the beloved former L.A. Phil Music Director Carlo Maria Giulini got his start as a violist. Still, Harding does love to fly. Noltemy says with a laugh that an additional project on Harding’s plate is to take the training for piloting the latest Air France transatlantic jets that fly between Paris and L.A.