Classical byDermot Clinch

Nicholas Maw's Odyssey lasts 95 minutes. It is "the longest continuous piece of orchestral music yet written" and my train limped back into London Euston at 1.10am. Before last week's performances, the question of size eclipsed all else in discussion of the work, and the talk was X-rated: size, length, stamina, staying power, climax.

"Finally," said Sir Simon Rattle, in his guided tour of Odyssey before the interval, after which he would conduct the piece itself, "we move, after yet another climax, to the epilogue . . ." The exasperation was unintended. Rattle is the work's greatest champion; his recording on EMI is a feat; his performance of the piece with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was both rare and superlative.

The CBSO laid on limbering-up sessions and training jamborees. First the composer: dark suit, polished business shoes, change jangling in trouser pocket, the club chairman in sober conversation. A private romantic in an unromantic musical environment, Maw described how Odyssey had taken 15 years to write and how he found himself obliged, at the end, to compose one of "orchestral music's great climaxes" in order to administer the final coup de grace to his affair with the piece. He hoped we would notice.

The first part of the concert was then a pep talk from Rattle with illustrations from the premier-league orchestra he has recently left. This, said the humble conductor, was so we could keep our bearings when we heard the piece and not be like him in a new art gallery, getting stuck in the first room because you don't know about all the great stuff in the others. Rattle's chat was spiked with encouraging middle-of-the-road nods, towards the music (bad) of Shakespeare in Love and the novels (good) of Peter Ackroyd, and nobody dared suggest that a first duty of narrative music might be to do this signposting for you.

Did we need stamina? Endurance is part of the game with Mahler or Bruckner, as it is for Maw. All music fights against ambushing thoughts of bed, breakfast, where to go this summer, the bastard in the office, and it is long music's battle more than any. There were nervous glances at watches. That banging on about size had prepared us for the worst, and our consciousness of time had been raised.

The best had hardly been mentioned. The work's "Ur- theme" is four times longer than the average for a big symphonic work, we were told. But what of the bubble of clarinet, squeak of oboe, jitter of amused violin that surround it? What of the grand, doomily charged horn and drum arpeggios colouring the slow movement? The wispy, Watteauish grace of the intermezzo? The arcs of melody, counterpointed against close-cropped harmonies on woodwind and brass, that dominate the work's expansive landscapes?

How long is long, in any case? Mahler's Fifth is 20 minutes shorter. The first act of Parsifal is ten minutes longer. A serious Indian raga would be winding up the intro while Odyssey was staggering off stage. Odyssey is about more than size, as Rattle's gigantic performance showed. It is about romantic statement, personal affirmation, the reactionary defending of the orchestral status quo, about last blasts from lost worlds and being a serious work of art.

It is also the composer's personal odyssey from the trap of organised atonality to the blushful, chateau-bottled major chord on which the work ends. The piece was chosen, in Rattle's continuing survey of 20th-century music, to represent the 1980s. But its trek from greater to lesser dissonance, from the hard to the soft, is that of the postwar period: a relaxing journey that not only Maw's, but all music, can now be seen to have travelled.

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