Daniel Harding about ten years together with the MCO
You have worked with the MCO since the very beginning. What has changed when you compare the Don Giovanni experience with the work you share today? Daniel Harding: I remember at the beginning there was an incredible sense of adventure. Every day we were playing something new, meeting new people and perhaps there was something of a desire to be different, to be interesting. I think the curiosity is still there and certainly the massive commitment, but there is a growing maturity. I think the MCO is about quality, concentration, passion and a fanatical devotion to the music. I never get the feeling people in the orchestra think of themselves as alternative or have a need to prove how interesting or dynamic they are. It is all about the music.
Today, almost ten years later, you conduct the anniversary concert, also in Ferrara. Did you expect something like this in 1998? Did you expect anything? Daniel Harding: In 1998 I don’t think any of us were imagining what the orchestra would be in ten years. There was a fascination with the present. I think the greatest achievement of the last ten years is that the orchestra has constantly grown and developed. Key musicians have moved on at certain times but the group has always been the stronger for it. I have never looked back on a project we have done without feeling we could do it better now! Long may it remain the same!
You realized together a lot of different programmes. Which one do you have in special remembrance? Daniel Harding: There are so many memories. I think the series of Schumann Seconds we did, finishing in Moscow in November 2005 was a real highlight for me. It is a piece that requires such a good balance between the magnificent, the monumental and the intimate, the intellectual. The singing and the discourse. There are not nearly enough musicians for whom Schumann is a great love and it is great tribute to the MCO that everybody who played that tour still talks about this piece with such awe and affection.
The three last Mozart symphonies in Japan… This programme, almost three hours long, every single repeat, two intervals, was more exhausting than any opera we have played. After the darkness of the g minor symphony we all felt we could not go on, and yet every time the Jupiter came and saved us. This was never like a concert, more a deeply serious religious or intellectual ceremony. Something between reading Aristotle and attending High Mass!!! (But perhaps a lot more fun as well?…) And, maybe bizarrely, I always remember the Magic Flute we played in Vienna very fondly. Not for many reasons, but very clearly for the way the orchestra played. I don’t think there is a critic in the world who had a nice word to say about any of us but they obviously missed the fascinating and beautiful things I could enjoy listening to every night in the pit…
Così with Patrice Chereau, listening to the orchestra rehearse with Pierre Boulez. Many, many great moments.
Do you have any special programme or special project in mind which you would like to realize especially with the MCO and if so, why? Daniel Harding: We are going to play Wagner together. In the last 40 years there have been revolutions in our understanding of the historical development of performing tradition with almost all of the great composers. Wagner will, I am sure, be the next and most contentious one. There is no composer who attracts so much fanaticism, much of it ludicrous, and in my opinion no composer where the performing tradition has become so stylised and immovable. If people didn’t like the Magic Flute what will they make of our Wagner?!
Which artistic ideals keep you connected to the MCO? Daniel Harding: The minute I feel that we stop developing together I will leave the MCO. No orchestra and no conductor can afford to stand still, to be satisfied. I think the connection lives because we share the desire to always add to our understanding. To play every project and feel that we cannot do better yet we have learnt SO MUCH since the last one! We never just rehearse and put a concert together; it is always about understanding why we play the way we do. This means the things we learn or discover apply far beyond that week’s concert. Many times we believe strongly in something and then, later, believe the opposite. All the better! If we can’t change our minds we are nothing. God forbid we ever join the select group of people who believe they have it all sorted out!
Talking with orchestra musicians about the MCO one often hears that playing in this orchestra feels a little like being in a family. Following that idea, how would you describe your role? Father? Brother in law? Daniel Harding: I couldn’t possibly answer that one! I have so many roles. Remember that we have grown up together. The relationship is of course primarily musical but these musicians are in so many ways my family above and beyond using the word as an analogy.
How important is this spirit of friendship and family for you as conductor but also as private person? Daniel Harding: A conductor is, and must always be, essentially alone. Therefore having a place to work where the normal rules don’t apply is a gift. I can never be wholly part of the groups, that would make it impossible for me to make important, hard choices or to have the distance needed to do my job but with the MCO the distance is immeasurably smaller and for that human contact I am so grateful.
Apart from artistic and musical quality, the MCO and Daniel Harding are well known for freshness, enthusiasm and vivacity. Some people just call this ‹youth›. How do you feel about that? Daniel Harding: I think it is a boring idea. I would love to distance the MCO from the idea of youth. We cannot live from that, we are losing it every day! When we play youthful music we should feel young! I think the MCO can be many things, the orchestra is like a chameleon with the music it is playing, also emotionally. It is dangerous and narrow-minded to talk about youth or to try and sell it. Young people must be young, that is sure, and there is much to celebrate in that but musicians change when they play. We should become the music not make the music become like us. I cannot bear the idea of an orchestra which has a personality that it forces on to the music it plays. The MCO, and anyone with sensitivity can recognise this, is far beyond that and I love them for it!
Trying to foresee: The MCO in ten years will?… Who knows? Daniel Harding: If there is one thing we have learnt in ten years it is that things change very, very fast. In ten years the MCO needs to be still around, happy, and much better than it is today. Like every orchestra in the world!
If the MCO was a car make, it would be… Daniel Harding: An Aston Martin. If James Bond had an orchestra it would surely be the MCO.
