Daniel Harding: LSO's boy wonder

Daniel Harding is 31 but, as he's forever being reminded, he looks much younger. An advantage, you might think, in these ageist times. Up to a point. In the rarefied, higher echelons of the classical music world there is a suspicion of youth. Certain works are considered off-limits until you "come of age". But Harding, who was mentored by two of the biggest names in the business - Sir Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado - has packed an awful lot into his 31 years and if anyone can turn prejudice to his advantage, he can.

In fact, he already has. There aren't too many of the world's great orchestras that haven't courted him. The night before our meeting he stood before one of the most venerable of them all - the Staatskapelle Dresden - and conducted a work hitherto regarded as the sacred domain of the older maestro - Mahler's Ninth Symphony. The reviews were decidedly mixed. Harding predicted that they would be. But he came out swinging.

"Mahler was not yet 50 when he wrote the piece. So age is always relative. I'm 31 going on 50! But the Ninth Symphony is really not ultimately about the acceptance of death - it's about the will to live. Mahler is clinging on to his youth as surely as he's clinging on to life."

He's right, of course. Mahler's Ninth is about living in the shadow of impending death and what Harding's performance conveyed best of all was the lustfulness, the fighting spirit underpinning this dark night of the soul. He even persuaded the traditionally benign Dresden orchestra, an orchestra famed for its mellow sound blend, to cast aside inhibitions and really lay bare the acerbic nature of the music. Did he encounter any resistance?

"When an orchestra has a real cultural tradition behind them, then provided you find the right way of going about it, you can persuade them to try new things. It's the orchestras without that tradition - naming no names - that are often the most inflexible."

It's interesting to note that Harding's mentor Rattle (whom he assisted in his late teens) made his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler's Ninth a decade or more ago. It was a momentous occasion for Rattle, and Harding was there to share it with him. "I remember how quiet Simon was the night before. I could tell how nervous he was. Actually, it was Claudio Abbado who advised him not to talk too much at that first rehearsal, but rather let the orchestra play. Then in the second, when you have established what you are working with, you can start shaping the details."

Harding still calls Rattle when he needs advice. He is, Harding says, good on the psychology. He called him the night before he debuted with the Vienna Philharmonic in the Deryck Cooke performing version of Mahler's unfinished 10th symphony. And that was a much tougher call, since the Philharmonic had hitherto resisted performing a work they didn't consider to be all Mahler.

But Harding was undaunted. "You have to have the courage of your convictions. You can't go in to an engagement simply feeling honoured to be there. If an orchestra gives me a feeling that they are doing me a favour by inviting me - however famous they are - then I won't go. If I'm not yet good enough then I don't want to pretend that I am."

Fighting talk. And there's more: "Remember it's not me or anybody else who has to make Beethoven Nine or Mahler Nine profound. Conductors are not composers. We cannot overstate our importance."

Tell that to the great and the good - and the egotistical - of his profession. The image of the conductor as autocrat and dictator may have all but vanished in the last half-century, but the influence on performing styles is still with us, says Harding. "There is this kind of pressure from tradition that once a standard has been set for a particular way of doing something, who's the one who's going to be brave enough not to do it that way again? I am fascinated by old recordings, and if you listen to a cross-section of them from around the 1930s and 1940s the whole idea of what music should be and how it should sound changed. This idea of music as some kind of high altar is something that didn't exist before the Nazi time. There was a kind of machismo associated with music-making then. And it's still with us even now. We have spent so much time re-evaluating 18th-century performance practice, but what about the 19th and 20th centuries?"

How to "turn the whole thing around" opens up a lively debate about the all-important transformation between rehearsal and performance: "It may be a cheap analogy but I see it as building a fire. You are putting all the pieces of wood in the right place but until you put the match in nothing really happens. And nothing will happen if you haven't stacked the wood properly."

Right now, Harding is not so much stacking wood as securing the concrete foundations of his position as principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. During March, April, and May, a series of concerts in partnership with UBS will play to Harding's strengths. Mahler will rub shoulders with Rameau, Berg with Dvorák, Boulez with Berlioz. The LSO, he says, is "a phenomenal machine. You feel like you're always catching up with them. They'll take anything you put before them, organise it, master it, and present it to you on a plate saying: 'OK, so what do you want to do with it?'"

Which is exactly, of course, what Harding wants to hear. If he has a fault it is this: that his musical intellect, his scholarship, sometimes inhibits his spontaneity. All the same, he is the driving force behind another UBS project, Sound Adventures. It's a scheme whereby young composers get to hear a piece of their music played by the LSO. They get instant presentation and feedback.

"One young composer wrote a very good piece but as soon as he heard it - despite everyone's enthusiasm - he wanted to re-evaluate the whole thing. The point is that music doesn't exist on the page. It's a beautiful myth that composers or conductors can really know how something will sound by looking at it. Music only comes alive in the playing of it." Which is where Harding came in, I think.

Daniel Harding: an LSO Portrait begins at the Barbican, EC2 (020-7638 8891) on 22 March