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The Los Angeles Philharmonic has announced that Daniel Harding will be its next music director. His term will begin in the 2027/2028 season. He will succeed Gustavo Dudamel, who has held the position since the 2009/2010 season and will move to the New York Philharmonic as music director from the 2026/2027 season.

Harding is a 50-year-old conductor born in Oxford, England. He worked as Simon Rattle’s assistant while attending music high school, and made his professional debut in 1994 conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra while still a student at Cambridge University.

He was later recognized by Claudio Abbado, and in 1996 made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and also appeared at the BBC Proms as the youngest conductor to do so.

He has previously served as music director of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (1999-2003), the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (2003-2008), and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (2007-2025). He is currently the music director of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Italy.

He also served as music director of the Orchestre de Paris from 2016 to 2019, but resigned “to become a pilot.” After that, he passed the pilot’s exam for passenger aircraft and has been working as a pilot for Air France since 2020.

He has previously piloted flights to Paris, Milan, Stockholm, and Tunis, and in January 2025, he made headlines by personally flying members of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia from Rome to Paris on an Air France flight.

With this personnel change, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has established a new leadership team: Harding as Music Director, Esa-Pekka Salonen as Creative Director, and Anna Handler as Permanent Conductor. They also announced the creation of two new artistic positions: one for Latin music and another for film.

PHOTO：Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia


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