Second in popularity only to Die Fledermaus, Strauss’s The Gypsy Baron is a colourful comic opera whose vividly drawn characters include a gypsy girl who turns out to be a Turkish Pasha’s daughter, a fortune-telling Romany queen, an exiled landowner, ridiculous local dignitaries, hussars and, inevitably, a band of gypsies. Embroiling themselves in the entertainingly convoluted plot, the stellar cast of this 1954 London recording includes Gedda, Prey and Sinclair, still in their twenties, and Schwarzkopf, yet to turn forty and at her peak.