In a climate where the classical music establishment clamours to attract baby-boomer audiences, and ageing rock music fans come out for any posthumous tribute to the music of their youth, it’s easy to understand a project like Tolga Kashif’s The Queen Symphony. The problem is, which standards should one use to judge the results. Kashif himself calls the piece ‘neither classical nor popular,’ which doesn’t exactly make matters any clearer.

For this listener, when a piece uses orchestral-choral forces and has its première at the Royal Festival Hall, as The Queen Symphony did in November, its allegiances are pretty well drawn. This is largely to Kashif's benefit, since competing on the same ground with his musical sources would immediately stack the deck against him. Without the spark from Queen’s clash of musical personalities – the late Freddie Mercury’s shamelessly cajoling vocals and Brian May’s edgy guitar playing – Kashif has only the melodies to work with, and any similarity between his symphonic treatment and those 1970s’ guitar-driven albums (which proudly declared ‘no synthesisers’) is purely coincidental.

On the other hand, The Queen Symphony falls into a rather long symphonic tradition, from Haydn to Beethoven to Mahler, of transforming folk materials into more thoughtful art. It also falls in line with a more recent practice, since commercial music has now supplanted true folk art in the public ear, of mining the pop charts from Elvis to Led Zeppelin for inspiration. Similar as this may sound in theory, it comes from an entirely different world – that of the composer/performer where both copyright laws and public consciousness ensure that a Queen song will always be a Queen song regardless of the context.

Kashif, an established film composer who has composed and arranged songs for Lesley Garrett, would seem to have exactly the right sensibility to compose within those limitations. And at its best moments, The Queen Symphony weaves themes from songs like ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ and ‘We Are The Champions’ into a fine rhapsody, if not exactly a Bohemian one. Too often, though, Kashif’s orchestral patchwork merely serves up warmed-over Rachmaninov, with some early 20th-century British symphonists on the side.

Even compared to a similar project – Philip Glass’s Low and Heroes Symphonies, inspired by the David Bowie-Brian Eno collaborations from the same era – Kashif’s tribute offers little compelling reason for its existence. Glass’s works, though filled with plenty of their own limitations, at least had a stylistically identifiable composer at the helm. The problem with The Queen Symphony is not that there’s not enough Queen, but, ultimately, that there’s too little Kashif.