At 81, Tony Bennett — the Pavarotti of Pop — has become an icon of everything that’s worth preserving in 20th-century musical culture, living proof that one man can dream the impossible dream, take a stand against the barbarians and philistines, and walk through a storm with his head held high. Yet I have to admit that this is the last thing in the world I am thinking about when I listen to Tony Bennett sing: When he is performing, as he did on Saturday night in the first of two concerts at Radio City Music Hall, it’s impossible to keep your mind on anything but the music itself and the message that he’s flawlessly communicating.

In 2006, Mr. Bennett was the subject of universal media attention because of his 80th birthday as well as a highly successful retrospective album of duets with contemporary stars. In 2007, he has done even better with a limitededition boxed set of 13 classic albums, a new Christmas DVD, a new documentary to be aired Wednesday on PBS’s “American Masters” (produced by Clint Eastwood), a new single-disc collection of standards drawn from his vast catalog called “The Ultimate American Songbook,” a new book of his paintings, and, quietly, getting married a month before his 81st birthday.

As he showed on Saturday night, Mr. Bennett has set the bar so impossibly high that his only competition is himself: Every time you leave a Tony Bennett performance, you have to be thinking to yourself that this is the absolutely greatest performance of his you’ve ever seen, or he hasn’t done his job. Having seen him at least a hundred times in 25 years of following his career, I was only disappointed once, and that wasn’t his fault: Last year, a local radio station presented him in concert at Madison Square Garden, and then sabotaged the event by having their deejays strut out and act as if we were there to hear them talk, and also by having Natalie Cole (who can sing standards really well when she chooses to) open for him with a rock-and-roll set.

Last year’s Garden show was a threehour evening, only an hour of which (Mr. Bennett’s segment) was worth hearing; Saturday’s concert at Radio City was just the opposite: 100 minutes of pure, undiluted Tony. Mr. Bennett went on precisely at 8:00 with no opening act — not even an instrumental by his quartet (with his longtime musical director, the outstanding Lee Musiker, back at the piano) and kept going, without an intermission, until almost 10 p.m. As always, he generously allotted solo space to Mr. Musiker and the remaining members of the group, guitarist Gray Sargent, bassist Paul Langosch (who has been with Mr. Bennett the longest, and is regularly featured on “Speak Low”), and drummer Harold Jones (who played for Count Basie for six years).

Mr. Bennett saved space for most of his big hits, from “Because of You” through “I Wanna be Around,” “The Best Is Yet To Come,” and the blockbuster “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Yet I kept being surprised by the many numbers that Mr. Bennett hasn’t done for years, at least not in New York, such as his ’50s showpiece, the rabblerousing “Sing You Sinners,” and a particularly warm and winning “The Way You Look Tonight,” in which his tenderness actually seemed to grow with each word, corresponding to Dorothy Fields’s lyrics, and he incorporated a laugh that wrinkled his nose on that line.

Mr. Bennett’s chops are in remarkable shape: He sounded slightly hoarse in the first number or so, but soon enough was belting at full strength. As always, his key element is dynamics, as he builds from intimate whispers to big blasts that he saves for emotional climaxes. The end of his show is the only part that is generally fixed from year to year: an Ellington segment with “In a mellotone” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” highly featuring Messrs. Musiker and Jones, then his unamplified “Fly Me to the Moon,” and then a subtle and intimate “Just A Little Street (Where Old Friends Meet),” dedicated to his home neighborhood, Astoria. The official climax is the epic “How Do You Keep the Music Playing,” which ends with the singer climbing an octave in a way that’s equally chromatic and dramatic. Then, when we’re really lucky, he sings an encore, “Once Upon a Time,” Charles Straus and Lee Adams’s beautiful reflection on past and present, and a perfect closer.

Before Mr. Bennett sang “Maybe This Time,” which he dedicated to Liza Minnelli, he pointed out that her father, Vincente Minnelli, had been one of the designers of the Radio City stage, and said, “They don’t build ’em like this anymore.” He was speaking of the theater, but he could have been talking about himself. It’s almost been 15 years since Mr. Bennett’s Grammy-winning appearance on “MTV Unplugged,” meaning that most of the Generation X-ers who rediscovered him in the early ’90s are themselves now over 40, and the theater was packed with 20-somethings as well as their grandparents. Even after singing professionally for 60 years, there are still innumerable generations left in Tony Bennett.