Tobias Picker’s Opera Without Words is a brilliantly colourful concerto for orchestra in which the purely instrumental voices are taken from a secret libretto he co-wrote with Irene Dische. The words in operas, the composer writes, ‘are just an ornament to hear the beauty of the human voice. The music should be telling the story.’

Whatever the story, it is rich in wide-ranging, easily flowing, always absorbingly kinetic scenarios composed on a late Romantic core with nods to an assortment including Babbitt and Mendelssohn. No moment goes by without some arresting phrase or sigh, gorgeous flourish or melodramatic outburst. He makes solo strings do unimaginably delirious things, has invented new ways of making winds sound like strings, and promiscuously hands out audiophile riffs for unorthodox combos such as solo piano with two bassoons or tubas singing like Gerard Hoffnung once dreamt. Hedging bets, Picker has documented the creation so it can be performed as an opera with voices, words and staging.

Three decades earlier Picker had found in Melville’s immersion in the Galapagos Islands a narrative arc that lay ‘in the border zone between poetry and prose’. It remains a series of haunting sketches that depends on the narrator and in this, Picker’s plain American accents do not erase the memory of Sir John Gielgud’s deeply touching reading (Virgin, 7/91 – nla).

Thomas May’s detailed account of Picker’s working process makes the virtuoso performances by Giancarlo Guerrero and the commissioning Nashville Symphony, captured splendidly in the spatial beauties of Laura Turner Concert Hall, even more enjoyable.