With 17 separate items, attending the Last Night of the Proms these days is a bit like shopping at Tesco. If you don’t like taramasalata, there’s always four varieties of houmous. Among the spiciest dips on Saturday was the glamorous Alison Balsom playing Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with a beguiling soft-edged sound, then dazzling in Piazzolla’s Libertango. She could have stolen the show, but the mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly pipped her by appearing in no fewer than four different guises (and costumes): regal in the Lament from Purcell’s Dido; darkly expressive in Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen; smoochy-voiced in Gershwin; then magnificently decked out as Admiral Hornblower, or maybe Captain Pugwash, in Rule, Britannia!

Between all this came two joyous rarities — Oliver Knussen’s thrilling little Flourish with Fireworks and Villa-Lobos’ pulsating Chôros No 10, vibrantly hurled out by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus — and some funny nonentities, such as Ketèlbey’s maudlin 1915 hit In a Monastery Garden and Henry Wood’s hilariously overblown mistreatment of Purcell, New Suite. That wasn’t the evening’s most preposterous item. Malcom Arnold’s A Grand, Grand Overture incorporated vacuum cleaners, rifles and floor polishers (David Attenborough, Goldie and Rory Bremner among the virtuoso skivvies) — but that’s actually supposed to be humorous. Six fanfares by teenage composers were too short to make much impact, but were cleverly concocted to link up orchestras playing Proms across Britain. David Robertson conducted the show genially.

I wish I could be as enthusiastic about the Vienna Philharmonic’s two Proms. Whether wallowing in the velvet of Brahms’s Symphony No 4 or delivering immaculate flurries of triplets in Schubert’s Great C Major, the Vienna strings are still jaw-droppingly classy. But elsewhere too much was below par: thin-toned, uncharacterful winds; a horn section prone to lagging; and dutiful rather than inspired solo phrasing .

That sums up Franz Welser-Möst’s conducting of the Schubert too, and his anodyne Haydn (Symphony No 98) was frankly worse than most. It’s risible that anyone could have thought him a suitable substitute for the ailing Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Yet Welser-Möst soon becomes boss of the Vienna State Opera, so someone must rate him.

Zubin Mehta did at least inject the Brahms with zest and also supervised a refined performance of Strauss’s Don Quixote, showcasing three superb principals: the cellist Tamás Varga, the viola player Christian Frohn and the violinist Albena Danailova. Yes, she’s a woman, and, yes, she was co-leading the (still almost completely male) band. The bad news is that the orchestra hasn’t yet made her a full member.

After all that hauteur, Friday’s late-night Prom by Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble was a glorious tonic: flamboyant and free-spirited. Not all its cross-cultural mishmashes were compelling, but all were played with such an enchanting sense of belief and such superior soloistic and ensemble skills that 3,000 people called for more as midnight approached.

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