Don Aucoin, whose fine theater criticism graces the Boston Globe on a regular basis, must be bustin’ his buttons over this piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

Portrait of a Prodigy

Is Matthew Aucoin the Next Leonard Bernstein?

Most 4-year-olds going to visit their grandparents in Florida while away the flight kicking the seat in front of them. Matt Aucoin spent the trip composing “Cloud Symphony.”

His scribbled notes for the short classical piece were hard to decipher but the music—his first composition—sounded the same every time he played it on the piano. “It was lovely. A little ethereal,” his mother, Carol Iaciofano Aucoin, recalls.

The wiry tyke with greenish-gold eyes went on to bang out Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” on a toy piano at age 6; two years later, after the first performance of one of his orchestral works, he took his bow perched atop a chair. At age 11, he played “The Marriage of Figaro” from start to finish by heart, leading strangers to assume he was sitting at a player piano. Around the same time, he wrote his first opera based on the magical animals in a children’s book.

Now 24, Matthew Aucoin (oh-COIN) has become one of the most sought-after young voices in classical music . . .

Dad turns up deep inside the flattering two-and-a-half-page (!) feature:

When Matt became fascinated by churches, his father, Don Aucoin, drove him around Boston so he could sketch them.

We’re guessing Don Aucoin is more than happy to play second fiddle to his son in this – or any other – case.