H7steria, BBC Concert Orchestra, Queen Elizabeth Hall, review "Tending towards extreme emotion" is a dictionary definition of hysteria, and right now hysteria is in fashion in the arts. Gut-wrenching, visceral, twisted: these are our favourite words of approbation. So on the face of it, this concert of gut-wrenching and twisted music entitled H7steria from the BBC Concert Orchestra was a neat way to tap into the zeitgeist. Unfortunately the event lacked the courage of its convictions. The first piece, Schoenberg's nightmarish mini-drama Pierrot Lunaire, can still give a frisson of something deliciously decadent, a hundred years after it was written. But to work it needs middle-European cabaret sexiness, shrieking intensity and ironic detachment, all rolled into one. What we got from the "speech-singer" Allison Bell and the six instrumentalists was a beautifully moulded, terribly English, milk-and-water performance. The uncomprehending, careful literalism extended to everything, including the translations of Pierrot's gruesome adventures flashed up on the screen. To offer "vet of my soul" for the much more brutal expression "Rossarzt der Seele" is just risible. Ken Russell's film The Devils certainly was gut-wrenching, and Peter Maxwell Davies's incidental music for it - of which we heard two excerpts - certainly added to its horrors. But at a distance of forty years, and without the images of burning bodies, Maxwell Davies's distorted fox-trots seemed quite tame - though the closing, serenely angular polyphony, with the plainchant line sung by Ruby Hughes, was remarkably beautiful. Up to this point, the evening's aspirations towards lip-smacking relish in horror seemed half-hearted at best, and they fell away completely with Jocelyn Pook's Hearing Voices. Made in collaboration with director Emma Bernard, it was an exploration of female madness, based on the memoirs of sufferers incarcerated in asylums, including the composer's own great-aunt Phyllis. The words themselves, describing the torments of hearing "voices in the head" and the ghastliness of incarceration, were already heartbreaking, and Pook wisely provided a minimal musical dressing. Each episode was based on just two gently rocking harmonies, animated with Glass-like arpeggios, and little melodic tags which mirrored the voices on the archive recordings in a way clearly indebted to Steve Reich. Phyllis's words were given to mezzo-soprano Melanie Pappenheim, who rendered them in a performance of part-singing, part-speech that was a marvel of quiet and far-from-hysterical intensity. Truly it was beyond praise. To follow this with Patrick Nunn's derivative arrangement of Muse's hit single Hysteria was as crass as telling a joke after a funeral.