After a three-year, three-month and 24-day search, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has found its next music director in Grammy-winning conductor Daniel Harding.
Harding will oversee orchestral programming across the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, the Ford and YOLA in the 2027-28 season, succeeding his friend Gustavo Dudamel, who has served as music director since 2009.
Following his LA Phil debut at the Ojai Festival in 1997 and his most recent performance last summer, Harding was welcomed back to Los Angeles on Wednesday with an onstage Q&A at the Walt Disney Concert Hall — following an eventful Tuesday that included In-N-Out and a Dodgers game, of course.
“We spend a lot of our lives playing the same music, we’ve talked about pieces we’ve played 50 times. We have this mix between a desire to discover the breadth of this enormous repertoire, which we inherit, and which we create, with two premieres this week,” the musician explained. “We have this balance between wanting to go back to things that we’ve done before, because anytime you open a door, anytime you open a score, you start looking inside, you learn things that make you want to try again. Of course, we need that challenge for ourselves and for the audience.”
“And yet, it’s never the same. Even with the same musicians in the same concert hall — the world is different, you’re different,” Harding continued. “Our job as musicians is not to recreate the performance that we gave before or somebody else gave, and it’s not to try to give an answer that’s definitive; what we do is put another piece on this 3-dimensional puzzle so that all of us as a music community start to get the impression of what this piece is from every single perspective.”
According to Tuesday’s selection announcement, Harding is already set to lead the Brahms Second Piano Concerto with Leif Ove Andsnes, Leonard Bernstein’s “Jeremiah” symphony with mezzo-soprano Avery Amereau and Betsy Jolas’s “Latest” in November, as well as a program featuring Thomas Adès’ “The Exterminating Angel” Symphony and Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” in January 2027. He will then conduct eight weeks of programming in his inaugural season, bumping that up to 12 weeks annually in the years to come.
With that said, Harding also previewed his ambitious plans for 2029, which will mark the 100th birthday of the late Frank Gehry: “We know how important to him YOLA was, and we know all of these extraordinary buildings that house music, which he’s created, here and around the world. So we said, let’s take YOLA, let’s travel and let’s do a Frank Gehry 100th birthday YOLA international tour.”
The Wednesday event also featured a reception that boasted a menu full of local favorites such as Porto’s, Philippe, Kogi, Alfredo’s Fruits and Albert’s Mobile Ice Cream, as well as an open bar.
“We are immensely proud to welcome Daniel Harding as the LA Phil’s next Music Director, following an extensive search led by a committee of our musicians, board and staff. He is greatly admired by the orchestra and was the overwhelming choice based on their feedback,” president/CEO Kim Noltemy said in a Tuesday statement. “His intellectual curiosity, passion for bringing in and engaging with new audiences, global perspective and talent for nurturing emerging voices directly align with the LA Phil’s mission and vision. We are eager for Daniel to join our leadership team and open new pathways for creativity, collaboration and connection with our audiences and our city.”
“Making music with the magnificent LA Phil musicians is a thrill and an inspiration. Over recent years, the LA Phil has developed something extraordinary that cannot be manufactured: a kind of institutional charisma. That expands the vision of what you ask when thinking about what comes next, for the orchestra, for Los Angeles, for music and for our community,” Harding added. “Perhaps the hardest task in music is to take something already exceptional and to help it grow further. Inheriting an orchestra with a tradition that includes Giulini and Mehta and shaped most recently by Esa-Pekka and Gustavo is an extraordinary gift. So many great artists have found possibilities here that don’t exist anywhere else, and I come to California full of excitement for what we will discover and create together.”
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