Four programmes featuring Karlheinz Stockhausen, presided over by the composer himself, launch a week of electronic music at the Barbican. Tonight, the series brings the UK premiere of Friday from Light, an instalment of his opera cycle The Seven Days of the Week, but it opened on Saturday with Hymnen, the biggest, most ambitious of his electronic pieces, completed in 1967.

There are versions of the score for soloists, and another in which a full orchestra is introduced for the third of the four "regions" into which the work is divided. But this was the purely tape version, played in a darkened hall via four banks of loudspeakers arrayed around the auditorium. It was not a satisfying occasion.

Stockhausen was in charge of sound projection, but the Barbican's fan-shaped hall made it impossible for most of the audience to hear the four channels of the tape in anything like an equitable balance. I would guess that only 100 or so people lucky enough to be seated equidistant between the speakers experienced anything like the spatial effects that Stockhausen built into the piece. The rest of us found our sound picture overwhelmed by one or other of the channels. If we had stayed at home and listened to Hymnen in the two-channel recording on CD or the old LPs, at least everything that went into the piece would have come across. Though whether that would have seemed any more impressive is doubtful.

Hymnen has dated fatally - far more so than his earlier electronic pieces, such as the classic Gesang der Jünglinge. Electronic music techniques have improved by quantum leaps since he painstakingly chopped up pieces of tape and edited them together to make Hymnen, and the effects now seem crude. There are still a few breathtaking moments, when great planes of sonority slowly transform themselves, moving majestically from abstract sounds to concrete musical objects, but such moments are few and far between. Too many of the electronically generated sounds are unsophisticated, and the ways in which the national anthems - the work's raw material - are manipulated seem banal. Hymnen simply does not hang together any more. It has become a period piece, a bombastic legacy of the anything-goes, free-for-all aesthetic of the 1960s.

· Friday from Light is at the Barbican tonight. Box office: 020-7638 8891.