Composers and performers alike may strive for an improvisatory impulse in their music-making, but that’s rather different from allowing improvisatory freedom to render standard compositional checks and balances redundant. Naji Hakim’s status as one of the great improvising organists has fuelled much of his colourful and original music but in the case of the works presented here – particularly the more recent ones – it helps explain why the music feels so unerring, sprawling and soulless.

Structurally, the most satisfying piece on the disc is Hakim’s 1997 cantata for soprano and piano Phèdre, probably because Racine’s scenes prescribe their own floor plan. Still, the piece doesn’t have the harmonic adventure of some of the composer’s later works and Rima Tawil’s mannered singing, complete with wide vibrato, doesn’t do it many favours. Hakim borrows themes from Rameau and Pergolesi in his Caprice en rondeau (1998) and Diptyque (2014), both for flute and piano. We hear flashes of the composer at his best, mashing up the French organ and fairground music traditions in the latter’s ‘Humoresque’. The problem is that, despite charismatic performances from Magali Mosnier with Hakim on the piano, every paragraph flourishes and frolics as though it wants to be the last.

Hakim’s Piano Concerto (2015) – cast here for piano and string quintet, though the skimpy booklet notes don’t tell us what this ‘version’ derives from – seems to throw the formal rigour that Hakim can exercise out of the window. It is a string of improvisatory dances played without much subtlety (not least from the faltering quartet) but with plenty of relish. You get the impression, rather like an outlandish organ improvisation, that it was more fun in the execution than it is in the audition.