Does Bernard Haitink's conducting get better and better the older he gets? It certainly seems that way to me. If you were looking to find any fault in this first of two concerts at the Barbican with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe you might just about bring yourself to make a case that parts of Schumann's expansive and restless Manfred Overture, with which Haitink opened, felt a little overdriven. But that's as far as the doubts went. Taken as a whole, this concert was a rich and glowing embodiment of Haitink's enduring mature mastery, especially when working with such responsive musicians as the COE.

Haitink has always been an outstanding orchestral accompanist and, while pride of place in the Berg Violin Concerto went to the remarkable Isabelle Faust, who gave a rapt and intensely moving account of this most devastating and poignant of all 20th-century concertos, the whole experience was enormously enhanced by the sympathetic and unobtrusive control Haitink also brought to the translucent and wrenching orchestral music.

But it was Beethoven's Sixth Symphony where Haitink's art came most fully into its own. The tempi, quick in the modern manner but with an old master's sense of onward movement and direction, were utterly natural and appropriate, so that the point-making was fully integrated. The string sound, as ever with Haitink, was warm and balanced, the woodwinds likewise, and the sense of Beethovenian life-affirmation hugely moving.

Critics are supposed to maintain detachment and resist unseemly enthusiasm. But when the man on the podium is marking his 85th birthday this year and his 60th season of conducting – of which you yourself have attended getting on for 50 – then it was time to join in the cheering and the standing ovation that greeted Haitink after the Beethoven. So that's what I did, with enormous and lifelong gratitude.