Paul McCartney's pretentiously titled oratorio Ecce Cor Meum has been eight years in the making, he tells us. Eight years! Any tolerably competent student composer could have knocked off a better hour's worth of music than this vacuous tosh in as many days.

Invited by Magdalen College, Oxford to compose something to celebrate the 550th anniversary of the college's foundation in 1998, McCartney eventually delivered this feeble cod-classical meditation on peace and love, the flailing vapidity of whose music is matched only by the toe-curling triteness of the words ("So much wonder around us/All the love in the air").

Full marks to Kate Royal, the boys of Magdalen and King's College, Cambridge, and the Academy of St Martin's under Gavin Greenaway for doing their duty with mirthsuppressing sang- froid. It's outrageous though that Magdalen should commission something so amateurish.

The first half (which even Macca didn't bother to attend) prepared the way with more sentimental syrup from the great man's pen. One piece, in a rare moment of selfawareness, was actually called Junk. Royal, Andrew Staples and the Belcea Quartet put a brave face on it.

François-Frédéric Guy
Queen Elizabeth Hall
****

Peace and love are the preoccupations of Liszt's Bénédiction de Dieu dans le Solitude too, but the French pianist François-Frédéric Guy was not afraid to seize on the robust elements as well as the mystical.

His hallmark, however, is an undermining of metre and an avoidance of rhythmic emphasis that tends to deprive the music of its natural sense of momentum.

It makes for uncomfortable listening when one beat is elided with the next, as though slipping through quicksand.

In Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata, op53 - for all Guy's wonderful play of colour and tone - the result was unfortunate in that the dynamic, emphatic aspects so characteristic of the composer were continually subverted.

There were moments in Brahms's Sonata No3 in F minor where something similar happened, but the work was less compromised by it. Indeed, when Guy retreated into his private fantasy world, beyond metre and pulse, in the lovely slow movement, he tapped a vein of pure enchantment.

But there was even better to come. For an encore he chose the Intermezzo op116 no4, a dreamy Adagio with which Guy transported us for a magical couple of minutes far away from everyday reality. Utterly spellbinding.