Just as the 1972 Last Night (Philips, nla) was remarkable for the unforgettable appearance of Jessye Norman in one of her first performances in Britain, so this 2003 Last Night had a star in Angela Gheorgiu, fully deserving the Prommers’ adulation. In this crisply edited version of the evening’s programme Gheorghiu’s contribution – an operetta aria from her native Romania and the heroine’s tender aria from Catalani’s La Wally – sticks in the mind more than anything, thanks to her passion, imagination and glorious tone-colour. Leila Josefowicz, gives an uninhibited account of Saint-Saëns’s Introduction and Rondo capriccioso, but she can hardly match Gheorghiu’s voltage.

It is hard luck on Leonard Slatkin and his BBC forces that on the front of the booklet their names are given in type less than half the size of that for Gheorghiu and Josefowicz – unfair, too, when their contributions are not just electric but more polished than one might expect on such a wild occasion. The booklet provides full texts and translations, including the Grigoriu aria, and even Rule Britannia (looking very odd in German and French).In the Henry Wood Sea Songs the innovation was to have songs representing Wales (All through the Night), Scotland (Charlie is my Darling) and Ireland (in the title of Grainger’s arrangement, as used here, ‘Irish tune from County Derry’, in fact the Londonderry Air). It is fair enough to have the Prommers whistling ‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’, but on disc the out-of-tune ‘toot-toots’ in the ‘Hornpipe’ become tiresome. I suspect that judicious balancing by the BBC engineers puts across a crisper rendering of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ than usual. A vintage Last Night.