Naji Hakim's compositional style was, last evening, laid bare for the world to see in a premier concert performance of his Messe Solennelle, a thankfully short work in which the combined cathedral choirs of St Mary's, Edinburgh and Manchester, under the baton of Christopher Stokes, worked hard to make a silk purse from a sow's ear. Hakim's musical language is idiosyncratic – relentlessly so. Soaring melodies abound, yet somehow Hakim even manages to make the most simple of them sound ugly and harsh in a ridiculous parody of his predecessor at the Paris church of La Trinité, Olivier Messiaen. Add into the mixing pot a touch of Honegger, Poulenc and John Williams, and we have sci-fi meeting the vestibule of the organ aficionado. Which is a shame, since the performance by the fifty plus singers, also conducted by Edinburgh's Matthew Owens and brilliantly accompanied by Manchester Cathedral's Jeffrey Makinson, was, in fact, of top-drawer quality. Granted, by the end of the Gloria the children's voices were beginning to sound somewhat strained, giving rise to a harsh quality in their upper register, but, overall, their sense of ensemble was quite excellent and a compelling part of the evening's entertainment.

Other, slightly less dubious works also came under the hammer and even Hakim's Children, commissioned for the Lebanese Festival Al Bustan, a setting of a passage from Khalil Gibran's epic poem The Prophet, came across reasonably well. But when placed alongside Pierre Villette's Hymne à la Vierge, an unaccompanied work of exceptional beauty and affection, or Gabriel Fauré's Messe Basse, we can see that Hakim's choral writing is little other than a transference of the techniques he uses as an organist, something we had quite enough of in the opening half of the evening. It rankles when one has to constantly refer to others when describing a composer's work. Hakim's The Last Judgment, which had me saying the rosary when I got home, is a four-section work based on a subject that obviously needs no introduction. Some effective writing and virtuoso playing might have crept in somewhere along the way, but cliché after cliché – a parody of Messiaen's Dieu parmi nous – short, disjointed, lop-sided phrases – slow staccato passages – screamed and caterwauled at the bemused, if not, in the case of one, distressed audience.

If composition were not enough (I have to mention a well-co-ordinated and somewhat likable duet by Hakim, which featured his wife, Marie-Bernadette Dufourcet), the audience were treated to an improvisation on a couple of well-known tunes, in this case the theme from the film The Great Escape and Handel's 'See the Conquering Hero' from Judas Maccabeus. Hakim handled it quite intelligently, if not showing a modicum of invention not seen elsewhere in the evening's programme. But overall, this celebration of one of Paris's most renowned organist-composers has one wondering what, if anything else, graces that capital where the mere title Organist of Paris at onetime engendered a sense of excitement amongst audiences the world over.

John Woodford