Daniel Barenboim is at Carnegie Hall with the Staatskapelle Berlin conducting a Bruckner Symphony Cycle. So all is well with the world, except for the choice of music. Which is only to say that, of the three composers famous for writing nine symphonies, Bruckner would be our third choice. But I was in attendance for Bruckner’s best, or at least most likeable symphony—the seventh in E major. And the concert began with Mozart’s incomparable Sinfonia concertante, which could have redeemed anything short of a major disaster. (And there was fortunately no Schoenberg on the program.)

Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of a friend, I found myself in the first box of the first balcony—right above the stage, within easy throwing distance of Barenboim directly off his right shoulder. I could see Barenboim’s every gesture and expression. He was dressed, von Karajan-style, in lapel-lacking tailcoat and tie-lacking white collar, and resembled a nineteenth-century Midwestern preacher who had forgotten his hat. He is seventy-four years old, with gentle tufts of white hair, but his energy and command on the rostrum would have been extraordinary for a young man. He teased things out of his orchestra—crouching and crumbling the music in his hands like a giant cookie, or laboriously pulling hand over hand and then shoving everything he had received back at his players. Watching Barenboim conduct was such an experience by itself that one wishes he would give his future performances facing the audience, as Leonard Bernstein once did pedagogically in his Young People’s Concerts.