Daniel Harding

Daniel Harding rocketed to the ranks of international star conductors at an astonishingly young age, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra before he was 21 years old. His musical education started with recorder classes as a schoolboy, then violin lessons, eventually choosing trumpet as his instrument. When he was 14, Harding decided he wanted to be a conductor, conducting Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire with his school orchestra the next year. Harding wrote to Simon Rattle about this performance. Rattle, who himself had great success at an early age, says that when he saw...