CAN’T get away from the Queen, can we? First she collapses the Paul Burrell case; then we hear about mysterious “powers in the land”.

Meanwhile, each night at the Dominion Theatre a different Queen, the art rock legend, is being celebrated in a stomping revival show. Over there, on the DVD player, Queen: Greatest Video Hits I, newly released, leaps out into the living rooms. And now we have The Queen Symphony.

I didn’t know quite what to wear. Black leather, a swirling cape, something very tight and white, or just a pair of Freddie Mercury braces? Queen went through so many changes, sartorial and musical.

But none were surely so bizarre as those visited on them by Tolga Khasif, composer and conductor of this hour-long ramble through the group’s back catalogue. For forces Khasif drew on the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Crouch End Festival Chorus and the Finchley Children’s Music Group. All were soberly dressed.

Queen wrote classic pop songs, worth paying homage to. The simplest symphonic approach to Bohemian Rhapsody and friends would have been to deck them in finery and parade them one at a time: the Classic Gold tactic. But Khasif, an experienced British arranger and crafter of film and television soundtracks, had greater ambitions. Egged on by EMI Classics — there’s a CD too — he decided to hint at and echo or bang various Queen themes together, bundling them loosely, oh so loosely, into six capacious movements.

Suite maybe; symphony never. I’ve met blancmange with more shape.

Just when you were enjoying Bicycle Race jazzed up on John Lenehan’s piano, Khasif decided to go for pensive and lost the plot. That happened all the time. The last two movements congealed into an especially pretentious heap, filleted Bohemian Rhapsody leading into big oratorio shouts (We Will Rock You, We are the Champions), Latin moans and endless symphonic twaddle.

Heads nodded in the audience as favourite tunes poked through. They surely would have found much more enjoyment, though, listening to the songs neat. Khasif was unstoppable, twirling phrases here, suggesting a riff there, all the while couching rock music of the 70s and 80s in orchestral gestures mainly drawn from the turn of the last century.

The RPO beavered away, showing more fibre than they did in Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. The miking of Craig Ogden’s guitar damaged the performance even more. An odd night; only the most indulgent Queen fan could have walked away really happy.