In 2018, outgoing Berlin Philharmonic music director Simon Rattle told the orchestra’s in-house magazine, 128, “You probably need to be 90 to conduct this orchestra correctly.” Swedish conductor Herbert Blomstedt, age 95, proved the truth to this remark in a concert with the orchestra at the end of September. The Berlin Philharmonic is known for giving guest conductors—even music directors like Rattle—the cold shoulder. But on that evening, in a program of Schubert’s Third Symphony and Beethoven’s Seventh, the orchestra played with and for Blomstedt, hanging on his every gesture. Though Blomstedt had broken his leg in a fall in June and had to conduct sitting down, the two symphonies sounded so transparent, lean, and alive in his hands that it was as if they’d just emerged from a fountain of youth. It’s a phenomenon unique to Blomstedt: The older he gets, the fresher his interpretations sound. There’s no stubbornness, dogma, or egotism in his music-making, just eternal curiosity.

Blomstedt has been described as the “world’s oldest conductor,” but he’s not an artist to whom superlatives generally attach: Never the most famous or the most expensive, never the fastest or the slowest. Instead, he has a near-unique ability to hold the center and find the music’s inner light. Works never fall apart in his hands; they don’t fray, tear, or get bogged down in extremes. The piece is never overshadowed by gushing pathos or personal hubris. Instead, the listener senses that everything is in its right place, a prerequisite to musical pleasure. I met Blomstedt the morning after the first of his three concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic at his hotel close to the concert hall.