When it first appeared at Glyndebourne, praise was heaped on Peter Hall’s typically observant production in John Gunter’s authentically designed, atmospheric sets – Lady Billows’s breakfast parlour reminiscent of Glyndebourne’s Organ Room, Mrs Herring’s greengrocery and the milieu of the village fête are unerringly delineated. The whole thing was greeted as ecstatically when it appeared on VHS. Twenty years on, it has lost none of its power to delight ear and eye, with Haitink at his best in balancing the lyrical, parodistic and gently humorous elements in the witty, precisely timed and orchestrated score.

The ensemble of singers, all British and at their best, is Glyndebourne at its most convincing. Graham-Hall’s tall, gawky Herring, hen-pecked by his mother – a finely judged Patricia Kern – and longing for release from her hold, is a welcome and original interpretation of an awkward part. Patricia Johnson’s Lady Billows is at once commanding and faintly ridiculous – just right. As her puritanical sidekick, Florence Pike, Felicity Palmer gives one of the first of her gallery of eccentrics.

Among the other Loxford worthies, Elizabeth Gale is a nicely fluttering, scatter- brained Miss Wordsworth, Alexander Oliver a rightly pompous Mayor, Hammond-Stroud a benignly vacuous Vicar, Richard Van Allan a staunch, slightly sly upholder of the law. Alan Opie’s Sid and Jean Rigby’s Nancy are as amorous a pair of lovers as one could hope for, and vocally ideal. Indeed, everyone sings as to the manner born under Hall’s fluent direction for the theatre and video.

It would be hard to imagine the piece better done, and picture and sound complement the excellence of the whole. Aldeburgh at the time frowned on the Suffolk accents adopted; but they are so idiomatically done as to add to the fun of this desirable issue.