'I was an arrogant 18-year-old': Daniel Harding on growing up

‘Have a look at this,’ says Daniel Harding, goggle-eyed, between mouthfuls of salmon. The pictures on his smartphone show Claudio Abbado, one of his mentors, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Schumann’s Scenes from Faust, a work that gets closer to Harding’s musical personality than any other, which he has just recorded with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and which he will conduct in Berlin in December. ‘Doing his prep’, you might call it.

If ever a conductor was a child of his time it is Harding, who, at 38, remains engagingly youthful and ever curious, hence the use of technology to augment his preparation. It is 20 years now since the schoolboy trumpeter left Chetham’s School in Manchester, trailing clouds of glory. First he went to Birmingham, at Sir Simon Rattle’s invitation, to spend a year with the CBSO. After a year at Cambridge, which he spent largely on the road, fulfilling dates in his developing concert diary, he upped sticks to Berlin to serve as Abbado’s assistant for a further year.

As he forged his career in Germany, lives in Paris, and holds a permanent position in Stockholm with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, British audiences have not seen much of him in the past two decades. Even the Proms, which welcomes all kinds of waifs and strays, seemed out of bounds. Harding had not appeared there for ten years before his return this summer with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and also with the LSO for the memorial concert to Sir Colin Davis, an all-English programme capped by Elgar’s second symphony.