Risk-taking, mature and flexible – Daniel Harding is an exciting prospect in Los Angeles | Classical music

A the story of two conductors on the west coast of America this week. Yesterday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic announced this Daniel Harding will be their next music director from 2027, which is the time Elim Chan He is starting his teaching career San Francisco Symphony. Both are a time to look forward, showing commitment to the future of the orchestra and the performing arts in California.

Find out, what’s happening in San Francisco it looked very dangerous until recently, after Esa-Pekka Salonen’s unfulfilled dream of putting the orchestra at the heart of culture and art. It made sense – why not use San Fran musicians as the Silicon Valley of the humanities, without corporate evil, drunken algorithms and irresponsible technology? Tragedy: Salonen suffered from the plague among other things, and showed his artistic dissension with his team. letter of departure.

Now that the musicians are settled, Chan is free to mold San Francisco into his vision. Not even 40, he is young, but because of all his skills, including running games First Prom Night in 2024Last night last year, I lead the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, he arrives in the city without the property of an organization, and has the opportunity to lead the orchestra on the path he chooses: renovating the classics, reviving new music, connecting through the arts – everything is possible.

The same goes for Harding, who at 50 is in the midst of a musical career that doesn’t take things for granted. He arrived on the scene more than 30 years ago with the imrimatur of Simon Rattle in Birmingham and Claudio Abbado in Berlin, and he should have had great hopes in the 20s. But instead of following the way things were done in the previous generation, he brought a legal interest in detail and music to everything he did.

His first recordings with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which he also founded in 1997, show maturity and evolution at the same time. Listen to Mozart’s Don Giovanniwhich he did in the 20s to create with Peter Brook and it was written in 2000hear what I mean. In a play that even Harding admits today as extreme, he reimagined it as part of contemporary theater, full of poignant drama and brutality. From the beginning, Harding’s pace is fast and his style leans. This Don Giovanni is no Lothario but a wolf of fury and pure suspicion, and he is drawn to hell by ruthless forces.

Harding continues to not take an easy or conventional approach, and you can feel within the score that he is doing it in new ways. His A delightful symphony and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra is one of the most analytical performances of the work I’ve ever heard on the album, but his questions of the score Berlioz only increases its hallucinogenic power. That strange combination of analysis and inspiration is what drives her a concert recording of Mahler’s Sixth and the Bavarians, too, lit up from within with a raucous soundtrack that was devastating. There is a similar alchemy in his new photography, for Puccini’s Tosca and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where he is also director of music.

He draws an analogy between driving and his other job as a pilot flying for Air France. All of them are about legal preparation, but if the goal is to eliminate possible risks while flying; when he is conducting, his job is to push the musicians to the most dangerous place, to make it through the storm.

A a two-week festival Wigmore Hall’s 125th year began on Mondayand the stars are out in force, from pianist Yunchan Lim to soprano Lise Davidsen. The music room of the sanctuary remains and the place to go to hear Schumann and Schubert, but they go to Wigmore Hall for new music and collaborations their part. non-arts festivals sponsored by the council: towards the end of this year there are concerts and places to stay from Elaine Mitchener, Rhiannon Giddens and London Voices singing about Stockhausen waiting.

It’s hard to imagine a time when it didn’t have a reputation as the most anointed shrine to the center of chamber music, but I had the pleasure of meeting journalist and broadcaster Bernard Levin (in his pompous form. He made a trip since 1981), he wrote about the memories of concerts at the “maiden-auntish Wigmore Hall, little dreaming that in the fullness of years someone will build an even uglier concert hall, and call it the Queen Elizabeth Hall”, managing to disappoint everyone absolutely.

This week Tom has been listening: A stormthe album Flamenco bomb he took me. It imagines the funeral of Charles V of Spain in 1515, and creates a spectacular show through a soundscape that combines the historical traditions of Arab-Andalusian Spain with the Flemish musicians who took the Spanish court by storm. It’s about creating powerful, emotional, traditional music. Listen Spotify | | Apple Music Classical