Prom 7, Royal Albert Hall, London, review: Jacob Collier is a genuine phenomenon, but there's far too much going on in this soupy evening

It goes without saying that 24-year-old Jacob Collier is a phenomenon. There’s no instrument he can’t play, and he sometimes plays several at once. He made his name through YouTube multitrack arrangements of songs by Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, and others, for which he recorded all the voices. He’s a keyboard wizard with a preternatural ability to modulate, Houdini-like, through the most improbable harmonic sequences. He’s in demand as a collaborator by leading lights in every branch of showbiz, and he’s very big in Japan.

For Prom 7 he is joined by the folk singers Sam Amidon and Becca Stevens, the Gospel sextet Take 6, the Moroccan Gnawa singer Hamid El Kasri, plus his backing group, and the 70-piece big band Metropole Orkest under Jules Buckley’s direction.

Collier runs on stage like a gawky teenager (though offstage he’s a suave young gent) with arms and legs flailing in all directions, and rushes through the orchestra banging, plucking and playing everything within reach, then he bawls into his voice-synthesiser like a dog howling at the moon. Orchestral soup prevented his brief snatches of pianism being audible, or anything resembling a song, though the programme indicates that two had been sung before Sam Amidon comes on in a sudden hush to sing the third.

And so it continues, with Buckley and his band drowning anything that threatens to bring the noise down to a human level: a snatch of Gospel, a sweet little duet between Collier’s guitar and Stevens’s ukulele, or anything from the Moroccan singer and his guimbri – all lost in the din.

And as the evening progresses, Collier’s self-congratulation intensifies. “Now I’m birthing a new song of mine,” he announces to the assembled multitude before delivering a syrupy little number, “it’s tremendous to have you guys in my life.” To which, for some reason, the multitude responds ecstatically.

Well, a lot of them do – but definitely not all. A self-regarding schmaltz-fest of this industrial strength is clearly more than some people in the hall can bear. Collier can do a nifty one-man act, but here the boy has far, far too many toys in his pram.