A highlight: Herbert Blomstedt, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic

A conductor becomes good around the age of 60, Simon Rattle once said. At the age of 97, Herbert Blomstedt appears for three concerts in front of the Berlin Philharmonic and shows how much can still come.

“You little children are coming” was heard on the day before the 4th Advent – now even in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall – and apparently you can hear the little ones singing and dancing there too. But then a very old gentleman comes into the packed hall, the conductor Herbert Blomstedt, at the age of 97, carefully led by the arm onto the podium by the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. Blomstedt conducts Anton Bruckner’s monumental Ninth, his unfinished last symphony, which had been in the making for years until Bruckner’s death in 1896, no longer heard of by himself, and only performed for the first time in 1903.