There can have been no stranger occasion in the New Year’s Concert’s 80-year history than this: the Vienna Philharmonic playing from an empty hall in a half-closed city to a similarly afflicted audience scattered across half the nations of the world. Riccardo’s Muti’s remarkable address (happily retained here) will already have imprinted itself on minds and imaginations. But so, too, will the music-making. For this is a concert that grows to greatness.

For the musical hors d’oeuvres that traditionally make up the shorter first half, Muti and the orchestra have assembled a pleasing array of rarities, including music by two hitherto neglected Carls – Zeller and Millöcker – both born in 1842, the same year as the Philharmonic itself. Josef Strauss’s quick polka Ohne Sorgen is the most familiar of these preprandial treats. In what would be the final year of his all-too-short life, Josef Strauss was far from being ‘Without Worry’. But the band played on. It was a telling choice for this year’s concert. The second half is always the more substantial, but never has a programme built to its own private apotheosis as surely as this, with lofty yet almost unbearably moving accounts of the Emperor Waltz and the Blue Danube itself.

There are many delights on the way, not least the charming and occasionally uproarious Bad’ner Mad’ln (‘Girls of Baden’) by Austria’s most admired bandmaster Karl Komzák II – it was one of Hans Knappertsbusch’s favourite party pieces – or the charming juxtaposition of Voices of Spring and the birdsong-laden Im Krapfenwald’l. There is much to enjoy, too, in a sequence of Italian items that includes Johann Strauss’s Verdi-inspired Neue Melodien-Quadrille. This takes me back 50 years to Muti’s debut with the Vienna Philharmonic and a 1971 Salzburg Festival production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale during which he managed to turn this august ensemble (with advantage) into a plausible version of an Italian town band.

But it is to those two great concert waltzes that one returns. Rarely have I heard the melancholy, majesty and many-layered beauties of these wonderful pieces so movingly revealed. It takes a master conductor to guide an orchestra of the Philharmonic’s pedigree and power to heights of which even it can only occasionally dream; but that is what it is our privilege to experience here. A DVD is imminent.