[Plump Jack] has merits, brevity, and an excellent text. And there is nothing wrong with composers returning to a 'tuneful' idiom. But it does help if you can write tunes. Nearly all the text here (the Boar's Head scene from Henry IV, Part One) was set in dry, parlando style - whole sentences on a single pitch - with the voices often shadowed by cataclysmic percussion effects in crude, strip-cartoon fashion. Elsewhere the orchestra played whole-tone scales in unison fortissimo, or a harpsichord tinkled desultorily.