Something’s going to have to be done about mainstream contemporary composers, without a Plan B of their own, freeloading off popular culture for street cred. For every composer who uses jazz and rock responsibly there are at least twenty who don’t, and now John Corigliano serves up settings of Bob Dylan lyrics about as authentic to their source as Bert Kaempfert’s Swingin’ Safari is a rigorous primer about the anthropology of African music.

For anyone who properly cares about Dylan and appreciates the depth of his achievements and innovations, Corigliano’s Disneyfication will be a bitter pill. To clarify: these are not arrangements or variations on Dylan’s original themes. Corigliano is under the misapprehension that “folk music tends to set choruses of ever-changing words to the same simple melody”. But the lesson of Dylan, as he developed the heritage of early heroes like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, is that supple harmonic shifts can support a telling inference in the lyric, and that specific words allied to appropriate music conjure up a magical elixir.

Where Dylan finds clarity and individual expression, Corigliano creates vapid rhetoric and empty effect. As the soprano voice emerges from a portentous orchestral preamble filled with pompous chromatic polyfiller to declaim “Hey! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me”, the po-faced sincerity and woeful lack of historical awareness is beyond parody. Inevitably a wealth of association kicks in – the genteel whimsy of Dylan’s original guitar accompaniment; a perfectly constructed melody line that’s both catchy and allusive; that distinctive vocal lisp as Dylan enunciates the third syllable of “tambourine”. Sad to say, but the Corigliano take is as corporate and colourful as corrugated iron. And, in the finale, as the orchestra falls away to leave the soprano singing “Forever Young”, Corigliano hits his nadir. The “drama” in Dylan is in the fabric of his material and the manner of its performance – this is the great man reduced to high-camp Broadway.

Robert Zimmerman morphed into Bob Dylan because of his love of Dylan Thomas, and Naxos issue Corigliano’s Dylan Thomas Trilogy as a companion piece. Is it any better than the above? Could it be worse? Thomas Allen’s graceful delivery of Corigliano’s vocal lines is a plus, but does the trilogy get to the core of Thomas’s imagery? The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the wind…