LONDON
Daniel Harding:神童から只の若手指揮者へ [音楽時評]
かつて音楽学校の教師が当時16歳のDaniel Harding の指揮したSchoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,”のテープを有名指揮者に送ったものが，同じ曲の指揮を控えていた Simon Rattle に “a staggering, natural, physical gift.” “I don’t think any of us could say where it came from,” Mr. Rattle added, “but he had it.” と認められたのが始まりだったそうです．
さらにAs a result the young man became the maestro’s protégé: attending rehearsals, watching, learning, occasionally being passed the baton. Before long he became an assistant to Claudio Abbado, who called him “my little genius.” と Abbado にも才能を評価されて，so began the jet-propelled ascent of Daniel Harding. が始まったのです．
he conducted the City of Birmingham Symphony at 19, made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic at 21 and signed his first recording contract with Virgin/EMI at 22. と飛躍が始まったのです．
しかし，at the relatively desiccated age of 35, Mr. Harding makes his debut with the New York Philharmonic. You can only wonder what took him so long, until you see his schedule. Milan, London, Athens, Stockholm, New York, Tokyo: and all of those within just five weeks, in February and March.
そこでThe New York Times のMusic Critic がNew York のホテルで会って，“Where is home?” I asked. He looked me in the eye and said he didn’t have one. Literally.と今は自分の home は何処にもないと認めたと言います．家具は一時預かりにしてあるのだそうです．というのも現在離婚手続き中といいます．
one told me some years ago: “I never understand when people talk about good young conductors. What can good mean other than experience and authority? And how do you get that except with age?”
Like any prodigy, he spent the first part of his life with people asking, “You’re so young, how does it feel?” Now, just as irritatingly, they ask, “You’re not so young, how does it feel?” The answer seems to be that he feels relief.
You’re so young が You’re not so young に変わって，救われた気持だと言います．
Harding は，New York debut でMahler 第4番をやるのですが，それについて， “there’s no point, practically or musically, in someone like me coming in for a couple of concerts and trying to change that,” he said. But he too has ideas about Mahler. It’s his signature repertory. How does he accommodate conflicting views? “It isn’t difficult,” he said. “Finding common ground in Mozart is harder, because there everyone has their own way and is absolutely sure they’re right. But the closer music gets to our own time, opposing positions become less extreme. I’ve done Mahler with orchestras like the Vienna Philharmonic and Concertgebouw, that have very distinct Mahler traditions, but they’re all linked somewhere to a common source.” と興味深い表現をしています．
The Carnegie Hall の Derector はかつてLondon Symphony Orchestra のManaging Director で，Harding をPrincipal Guest Conductor に招いた人物で，Harding は広くColin Davis の後任のPrincipal Conductor に就任すると信じれていながら，実際には，別の天才指揮者Valery Gergiev が就任し，当分その地位にとどまると信じられているのです．
彼は今までの所，A class のorchestra の仕事に1度も就いていないのですが， “Although the Swedish R.S.O. has been the best thing that’s happened to me apart from Simon Rattle, it won’t be forever,” he said. “And when the time comes, the next move will probably be the really important one, when I settle and deliver the core part of my work, as you do in your middle years. “But that’s not a move you make on a whim. You have to get that one right, don’t you?” と期待を込めて語っていたそうです．
Prodigy Ages Into a Merely Young Conductor
David Azia for The New York Times
British conductor Daniel Harding, center back, conducts the London Symphony Orchestra during a rehearsal at the Barbican Center, central London, Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011. Mr. Harding, now 35, has been conducting orchestras in Europe since he was a teenager.
By MICHAEL WHITE
Published: February 25, 2011
David Azia/The New York Times Daniel Harding, rehearsing with the London Symphony Orchestra for which he is principal guest conductor.
SIGNIFICANT careers sometimes explode from chance events. This happened two decades ago in Manchester, England, when a teacher at a music school taped a rehearsal that his 16-year-old pupil was conducting.
The tape was sent to the eminent conductor Simon Rattle, who no doubt gets sackfuls of such things. And there the matter might have ended, with a polite acknowledgment and a “best wishes for the future” note.
But it just happened that the piece on the tape was Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,” which Mr. Rattle was preparing at the time. So he listened, was impressed, invited the teenager for a meeting and decided, as he later told me, that here was “a staggering, natural, physical gift.”
“I don’t think any of us could say where it came from,” Mr. Rattle added, “but he had it.”
As a result the young man became the maestro’s protégé: attending rehearsals, watching, learning, occasionally being passed the baton. Before long he became an assistant to Claudio Abbado, who called him “my little genius.”
And so began the jet-propelled ascent of Daniel Harding. He claims never to have had a formal conducting lesson, and he certainly bypassed any kind of conservatory training. But he conducted the City of Birmingham Symphony at 19, made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic at 21 and signed his first recording contract with Virgin/EMI at 22.
On Thursday, at the relatively desiccated age of 35, Mr. Harding makes his debut with the New York Philharmonic. You can only wonder what took him so long, until you see his schedule. Milan, London, Athens, Stockholm, New York, Tokyo: and all of those within just five weeks, in February and March.
When I caught up with him (it’s not easy) in a hotel here so fashionably discreet that you would never tell it from the surrounding warehouses, Mr. Harding admitted that the schedule was too much. “Where is home?” I asked. He looked me in the eye and said he didn’t have one. Literally.
“My furniture’s in storage at the moment,” he added. “It’s a temporary thing, and I’ll eventually get round to finding somewhere. But right now it makes more sense to be in hotels.”
The back story is that he is in the process of divorce: his marriage, as he sees it, a casualty of his calling. Asked whether he ever gives advice to aspiring conductors, he said ruefully: “Yes, but it’s mostly about the need to organize your life: how to be happily married and never there. I got that one wrong.”
If success has taken a toll on his life, it certainly doesn’t show on his face. He still has something of the fragile, pale and interesting look he had 10 years ago, enlivened by a schoolboy grin and a wiry build that could just pass for a teenager’s in the right light. But if childlike looks were advantageous — making audiences, managements and the media curious to see this wunderkind — they had their problems too. Especially with wizened players. As one told me some years ago: “I never understand when people talk about good young conductors. What can good mean other than experience and authority? And how do you get that except with age?”
Not surprisingly, Mr. Harding demurs. “My agent says you don’t get older, you just get more so,” he said, “your strengths and weaknesses more exaggerated, more pronounced. There’s something in that.”
Either way, he thinks there is something to be said for reaching 35. Like any prodigy, he spent the first part of his life with people asking, “You’re so young, how does it feel?” Now, just as irritatingly, they ask, “You’re not so young, how does it feel?” The answer seems to be that he feels relief.
“The very idea of conducting all these orchestras when I was 18, 19, early 20s, it was ridiculous but interesting in a freakish way,” he said. “And it’s liberating not to be so interesting anymore. With conductors there’s usually a period when they’re young and thrusting, another when they’re old and know what they’re doing, and 40 years between. That between period isn’t a bad place to be. It gives you space and time to sort out what you have.”
So his earlier work embarrasses him?
“Of course,” he said. “But that’s how it is at every stage of your life, and embarrassment is O.K., so long as you learn from it. I listened recently to a ‘Don Giovanni’ recording I made 13 years ago and thought, ‘What was I doing?’ But at least I was making my own mistakes, for honest reasons.”
“I suppose I could have studied the Giulini discs and copied them,” he added, referring to the respected Italian maestro Carlo Maria Giulini, “but that would have been pointless. It’s like when people advise young conductors to beat less, trust the orchestra more, and it’ll work better. They’re absolutely right. But telling you that is as useless as telling a violinist to play in tune and more beautifully. You have to find these things for yourself’.”
For Mr. Harding the finding took place in unusually exposed circumstances, with major orchestras in major houses: Covent Garden in London, the Aix-en-Provence festival in France, La Scala in Milan. And those were the dates that inevitably caught the attention of the press. But at the same time he was actually learning his craft in a quieter, more methodical way than the reports suggested.
He took positions with small orchestras in Trondheim, Norway; Norrkoping, Sweden; Bremen, Germany. He directed the youthful Mahler Chamber Orchestra. And he built relationships that still dominate his workload. His calendar may look crazy, but its crowded dates mostly involve the same 10 orchestras to which he constantly returns: especially the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, for which he has been music director for the last five years, and the London Symphony, for which he has been principal guest conductor for the same period. He is not professionally promiscuous. Nor is he dragged kicking and screaming into so much work.
“However many engagements I have in a season, there isn’t one I don’t want to do,” he said. “That’s the problem. I remember Simon Rattle being asked by Abbado to conduct his Mahler Youth Orchestra and prevaricating. ‘But you’ll love it,’ said Abbado. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ said Simon. ‘I’ll love it, then I’ll have to come back.’ And that’s how it is. I love the orchestras I work with, so I want to keep going back to them.”
Being committed to a group of orchestras makes a debut with a new one stand out; and the New York Philharmonic stands out more than most. Apart from odd engagements in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Atlanta, Mr. Harding’s American appearances have mostly been with European orchestras on tour. And he candidly admits that his few encounters with American bands “have never really clicked.”
“I’ve done repeat dates with them,” he said. “There’s been no bad feeling, just not instant love.”
Like many younger European conductors working in America, he has been disoriented by the culture of respectful distance and formality that survives there to a greater extent than back home.
“The first time I went to Chicago,” he said, “I remember looking at the body language of the musicians and thinking, ‘Oh, God, they really hate me.’ Then I saw them play a few years later with a conductor I know they adore, and the body language was the same, so I obviously shouldn’t have taken it so personally. But American orchestras do, in my experience, tend to be ultradisciplined in that way, and it’s easy to think they’re keeping you at arm’s length.
“I’m sure I’ve misjudged the etiquette every single time, thanks to spending years with ensembles like the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, where it’s like living in a kibbutz, with no separation or formality at all. If you bring any of that approach to, say, the Philadelphia, it can come across as inappropriate.”
So how does he approach his first appearance with the New York Philharmonic? With background research? Checking out the players?
“No, not systematically. But you ask around. In any new encounter with an orchestra there’s this kind of — dogs meeting thing.”
Asked whether he meant bottom sniffing, he gave the schoolboy grin from ear to ear. “Your words, not mine,” he replied. “I won’t have you say I’m looking forward to doing that to the New York Philharmonic, or them to me. But you know what I mean: a courtship ritual, where you present yourself to one another. It’s a shifting dynamic where you show how you approach things, see what they bring, observe how they react to your physical gestures.”
In New York he’ll be conducting the Fourth Symphony of Mahler, a composer about whom, as he says, “the Philharmonic will have very clear ideas.”
“So there’s no point, practically or musically, in someone like me coming in for a couple of concerts and trying to change that,” he said.
But he too has ideas about Mahler. It’s his signature repertory. How does he accommodate conflicting views?
“It isn’t difficult,” he said. “Finding common ground in Mozart is harder, because there everyone has their own way and is absolutely sure they’re right. But the closer music gets to our own time, opposing positions become less extreme. I’ve done Mahler with orchestras like the Vienna Philharmonic and Concertgebouw, that have very distinct Mahler traditions, but they’re all linked somewhere to a common source.”
However Mr. Harding fares in his Philharmonic debut, he has one sure friend in New York. Clive Gillinson, before he took over Carnegie Hall, was managing director of the London Symphony Orchestra. It was Mr. Gillinson who, in 2006, made Mr. Harding principal guest conductor of that orchestra. And there was wide, if wild, speculation at the time that he was perhaps being groomed for the job of music director when Colin Davis retired.
That didn’t happen. Instead, Valery Gergiev took over in 2007, and he isn’t likely to be moving on in the near future. So to the slight surprise of many, Mr. Harding now hits middle age without an A-list orchestra of his own.
When I put this point to him, he diplomatically replied that I should take a plane and hear his Swedish Radio Symphony, which gives, he says, A-list performances all the time. But the fact remains that, by general reckoning, the Swedes, however good, are not top rank. It would hardly be surprising if he were looking around.
He is probably not looking hard in Britain, his career having been firmly based on mainland Europe. But he admits that there have been offers, all of them turned down.
“Although the Swedish R.S.O. has been the best thing that’s happened to me apart from Simon Rattle, it won’t be forever,” he said. “And when the time comes, the next move will probably be the really important one, when I settle and deliver the core part of my work, as you do in your middle years.
“But that’s not a move you make on a whim. You have to get that one right, don’t you?”
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