Personal landmarks don’t come bigger than this. In the summer that Daniel Harding turns 40, he has landed the biggest and perhaps most surprising appointment of his career. Today the Orchestre de Paris will announce that the Oxford-born conductor is its next music director. This remarkable entente cordiale — the first British maestro in the orchestra’s history — will run from September 2016, initially for three years.
Nobody is more surprised, it seems, than Harding himself. “I first conducted the Orchestre de Paris 20 years ago, and it was one of the three or four worst experiences of my career,” he says. “They are well aware of that too, but we are very different now. I went back recently and found an ensemble that gives