My kind of program. No world premieres, just terrific standards, Shostakovich’s Festive Overture and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F Minor.

As good as the Grant Park Symphony is, even a heathen like me felt like I could appreciate the step up with the CSO playing. They were crisp, just like the air on this beautiful evening, when the gods also turned off the competition from the helicopters and sirens.

It was so magical that everyone around me actually listened to the music rather than orally exchanging recipes or whatever it is they usually find it necessary to discuss during a concert.

Admittedly, there was a woman coughing about six seats away, but even she did so in tune and time, so as to come off as a new kind of percussion instrument.

And, unsurprisingly, with the biggest crowd of the year in attendance, there were a few seconds of a crying baby, but the parents, unlike the ones on my recent flight, had the grace to remove themselves with child from the scene. To be fair to the people on the plane, however, there wasn’t anywhere they could get off at 30,000 feet, and the overhead bins were full.

The only real downside for me was that Conductor Riccardo Muti found it necessary to speechify afterward about how culture could bring us all together and solve all the world’s problems (sounds good, but maybe he should pay more attention to the news), and do an infomercial for the orchestra to the extent that I expected them to lower the giant screen and start flashing a subscription phone number with a list of ailments that classical music can cure.