With no metropolitan base to call its own and no real home at all beyond a

With no metropolitan base to call its own, and no real home at all beyond a statistical bias to Poole, the BSO spends most of its life on tour; and it has the nightmarish burden of dealing with 63 local authorities for funding. To hear the benchmark qualities of Odyssey is to appreciate how much of the bright young music currently attracting adulation in the hinterlands of Islingtonia is just trinkets and baubles.Meanwhile, as the CBSO basked in the afterglow of its relationship with Simon Rattle, I've been on the road with what is probably the least advantaged of the British regional orchestras, the Bournemouth Symphony. He seems to represent values that not many of the fashionable younger composers who have taken his place in the hierarchy of British music could claim for themselves, starting with emotional depth. I assume that's a connection Maw expects his listeners to make.But however you read the symbolism of Odyssey, it remains a landmark achievement by a British composer who, because he lives abroad, tends to be forgotten here When he comes back, it's almost as a figure of conscience.

As all Wagnerians know, E flat is the note that begins the epic journey of the Ring Cycle, surfacing from the depths of the Rhine like some First Cause in the world order. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about it is that its 90-minute journey proves to be a journey back into tonality - ending on an resolute, affirmative E flat. Odyssey functions like a giant stock- taking exercise in the emporium of modern (ie post-Romantic) music. Champions of the piece, like Rattle, would argue that it's not out of proportion to its substance or objectives And I'd agree with that.

When you're trying to construct a score out of a 44-bar theme, you need to give it room to manoeuvre. And grew.But that said, any sense of self-indulgence in the writing comes mitigated by a near-equal sense of necessity. Listening to Simon Rattle's performance with the CBSO, I noticed that there were times when this great, epic score betrayed its origins as a 20-minute BBC commission which got out of hand and grew. Whether it can also command the longest unbroken span of audience attention is another matter. The Great British orchestral curiosity of the 1980s is, at 90 minutes, arguably the longest unbroken span of orchestral writing in the whole history of the genre.

But it still left me with a sense that I'd been watching some rare dancing elephant: well-trained, good fun, but on the white side. With bold designs by Tim Goodchild and virtuosic lighting by Simon Corder, it looks pretty good as well. It's not a thing of stature.Talking of rare dancing elephants, the Royal Festival Hall played host on Monday to a performance of Nicholas Maw's Odyssey. The campery makes music of already questionable substance seem distinctly tacky - even though it's well-conducted by Oliver Dohnanyi, well sung by Alastair Miles in the title role, and very well sung by David Rendall as Faust. But one clear thing is that if you sell Mephistopheles as a laugh-a-minute romp, as Judge does, you make it hard for your audience to retune their expectations of the prison scene and feel anything for Margareta's plight The jokes are funny, but they duck too many issues. Judge's justification would presumably be that Boito doesn't take it too seriously either.In fact, it's hard to specify the tone of voice in which Boito speaks, and as the piece is done so rarely, there's no performing tradition for guidance. His Mephistopheles is a fiesta of swashbuckling theatre-camp that doesn't take itself, or the piece, too seriously.

And that's why ENO's new staging, which opened last Thursday, has been entrusted to a director with a reputation for all-singing and dancing, semaphore-style theatre: Ian Judge He doesn't disappoint. Mephistopheles isn't exactly cerebral in its address - it's an extravagant incitement to dramatic spectacle. That Gounod's version flourishes in repertory while Boito's flounders in the limbo of nice ideas says something about public taste, which has always favoured operatic appeals to the heart rather than the mind. But let's not get carried away here. And let's not forget the ref, who refused to let the occasion overwhelm him But then nothing much overwhelms Jeremy Paxman. Charles Gounod filleted the text down to its love-interest, focusing on Margareta and abandoning any semblance of philosophical debate; but Boito delivers the whole picture, including Helen of Troy and a spot of Satanic self- analysis. Arrigo Boito's ends in writing Mephistopheles were actually closer to Goethe's original than those of most operatic treatments.