Guest Blogger: Jamie Bernstein, daughter of the composer-conductor-educator Leonard Bernstein and participant in GREAT PERFORMANCES’ Carnegie Hall Opening Night 2008: A Celebration of Leonard Bernstein.

(premieres on Thirteen Wednesday, October 29 at 9 p.m.)

Oh, what a night! September 24th was the Gala Opening Night of Carnegie Hall’s 118th season, as well as the launch of the citywide festival The Best of All Possible Worlds commemorating my father’s 90th birthday. It’s nights like these that give the word gala meaning. There could barely have been more hoopla had my father been there personally (But there certainly would have been more hugs).

Michael Tilson Thomas devised a genuinely innovative program of Bernstein music for the San Francisco Symphony and soloists. It spanned the richly varied Bernstein repertoire, playing excerpts from the first Broadway show, “On the Town” (Christine Ebersole rocked the joint with “I Can Cook Too”) all the way to the challenging and poignant late opera, “A Quiet Place” (Dawn Upshaw’s ethereal soprano was perfect for “Didi’s Aria”). Yo-Yo Ma and Thomas Hampson brought me to tears with their duet on “To What You Said” from my dad’s piece, “Songfest.” It’s my favorite tune he ever wrote, and I couldn’t imagine it more beautifully performed.

So many resonances that night… there was MTT, my dad’s longtime friend and colleague (and my longtime pal, too), conducting in Carnegie Hall, where a 25-year-old Leonard Bernstein’s conducting debut burst forth like a comet across the American airwaves on Nov. 14, 1943.. and there we all were, his family and friends and fellow musicians — thousands of fellow New Yorkers celebrating the composer who, more than any other, had depicted their multifarious city in music.

And so many resonances for myself! As I walked the corridors of Carnegie in my evening dress, I could still clearly remember being five years old, and carefully lifting my patent-leather party shoe over the anaconda-sized TV camera cables that snaked down those very same corridors at the first Young People’s Concert in 1958.

And now, here I was at the splashy kickoff of my dad’s 90th birthday celebration presented, in an unusual partnership, by Carnegie Hall (where, for a time, he actually lived) and his beloved New York Philharmonic, now residing up the street at Lincoln Center.

I felt as if I were literally embodying this partnership myself. As I listened to “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story,” some of the most irresistible music ever written in this country, I thought about how, in the course of the festival, I’d be sharing that music while narrating two concerts for young people about my father: one with the Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, and one at Carnegie with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Imagine: sharing the joy of music – my dad’s own music, yet — with a new crop of kids at both of the houses where my father used to do the same thing! Nothing could be more gratifying.