One of the two star guests alongside the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conductor Jiri Belohlavek was soprano Renee Fleming, and she provided the most ravishing vocal sounds I've heard in the Albert Hall these past two months.
Looking resplendent in a purple power frock designed by Vivienne Westwood, she nailed the emotional heart of Strauss's songs in a way that stilled the waving flags and brought total silence to the packed hall
Later she found a different tone, defiant and burnished, in an aria from Smetana's Dalibor, and yet another, a dreamy and innocent tone, for Dvorak'sSong to the Moon from Rusalka.
Finally - now with her outfit topped with a frivolous quasi-naval hat and waving a dinky Stars and Stripes - she took Arne's Rule Britannia and made it into a vehicle for some brilliant vocal display. She truly is a complete singer, and right now must surely be in a class of her own.
But there were other good things, before sentiment and fun took over.
Young Ukrainian violist Maxim Rysanov took Tchaikovsky's famous showpiece for the cello, theVariations on a Rococo Theme, and turned it into a showpiece for the viola.
Or rather, he tried to. But though his arrangement of Tchaikovsky's piece was expertly done, and brilliantly played, he seemed to pushing too hard against the viola's essentially introverted nature.
The meditative unfurling of the Prelude from Vaughan Williams' Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra came more naturally (what a rare beauty this piece is, and how welcome to make this kind of discovery at the Last Night).
The BBC Singers were on hand too, and they certainly shone in Jonathan Dove's brand-new A Song of Joys, a five-minute setting of Walt Whitman's eponymous poem in leaping sprung rhythms. They weren't so strong in Parry'sBlest Pair of Sirens, where the men in particular seemed sluggish and ill-focused.
This year, the genuinely musical part of the Last Night encroached further than usual into the second half.
The very last item, Benjamin Britten's curiously touching arrangement of the National Anthem, felt like a last assertion of music's rights, just when the Prommers and flagwavers thought they had the evening to themselves.
But they can't be denied for long, and with You'll Never Walk Alone from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, sentiment and fun took over.
We clapped along to Nic Raine's pert new arrangement of a Fisher's Hornpipe, and when Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory came along, the din and the blizzard of flag-waving and shrieking of balloons seemed even more tumultuous than ever.
But then, that's true every year.
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