Everything had to be the way Lenny wanted it. I always say it wasn’t collaborative. People will ask me, “But isn’t conductor always the leader?” Yes, but there are conductors that will have a back-and-forth with the solo players — much more so than Lenny. And I don’t say that in a bad way, because what resulted was magical. But he was so convinced of his vision.

HARTMAN He wrote some amazing directions in his own music. I’ll never forget in “Chichester Psalms” where he has written “blissfully unaware of threat.” That’s a musical direction!

O’BRIEN We were doing Mahler’s Fifth on the 1968 tour of Europe and Israel. He was very free with his motions because he knew the orchestra knew the piece, and knew he could be relaxed and phrase differently each night if he felt like it. He didn’t feel he needed to beat out the time.

Our harpist got sick, I think in Venice. The substitute harpist had never played the Mahler Fifth in rehearsal. So there she was, shivering by her harp, and Lenny looked over and saw she needed clear beats. So he laid out every single note in the slow movement for her. That entire movement, he conducted it just so she could be absolutely clear of all the triplets and subdivided rhythms, which are very difficult. He knew she needed him. I was so impressed, first with his sensitivity. Second, I wish I had a film of that: He conducted like a conducting manual.

SHAMES For me the greatest thing about a conductor is how he paces a piece so that it creates a sense of inevitability in how it unfolds. Nobody did that greater than Leonard Bernstein. At that moment, it was the only way you could possibly imagine the piece to be. I thought that especially with Lenny’s last concert, the Beethoven Seventh. It was probably the slowest Beethoven Seventh I’ve ever played. In the hands of anybody else, I don’t know how it possibly could have worked. But it still had that magical arc that made every piece of it work.