A standing ovation two nights running. Ten thousand people on their feet, clapping. There does not seem to be much doubt but that Messiah XX1, Frank McNamara's Gospel interpretation of Handel's Messiah, which was performed on Saturday and Sunday at the RDS, was a popular success.

I was one of the punters on their feet shouting at the end of the show on Sunday night. I had been, I confess, so moved at several points during the evening that I had to dab my eyes.

But yesterday I could hardly find a positive word about the show from a reviewer in any national newspaper. The Evening Herald's coverage summed up the split between popular and critical opinion in one edition: in Dermott Hayes's social diary the event was declared "a triumph", while 10 pages later Andrew McKimm's review appeared under the headline "The Mess and the Messiah".

I cannot help thinking that the problems with the critics partly stem from Messiah XX1 being difficult to categorise.

It had its roots in classical music, but if you were passionately attached to the original you were likely to be disappointed, because it flowered into something entirely different.

It did not flower into rock, either, but into gospel and soul, which are among the less well-known musical styles in this music-mad State.

The emotion of soul embarrasses Irish people and gospel is even worse. Gospel is emotional about Christianity and that is far from being a winning formula in this State.

We have a history of formal, private belief and we are in such shocked retreat from a Catholic system of values which we think has failed us that a religious message, emotionally delivered, is bound to have a rough time in the media.

Gospel's message is also bound to appeal at a level deeper than embarrassment to most Irish people, however, and that is why they rose to their feet on Saturday and Sunday nights.

You have to give Frank McNamara huge credit for having the idea in the first place, but the score did not seem to do much to Handel but speed up the beat. The power of the event lay in the gospel voices of Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight, Jeffrey Osborne and the Visual Ministry Gospel Choir (sadly the voice of Roger Daltry of The Who just was not up to it).

It is true that Gladys Knight's voice was sometimes strained - the Gospel reinterpretation should have gone further. But what came across strongly was the strength of her connection with what is The Greatest Story Ever Told, and the central myth of our culture.

BLACK Gospel music is possibly the only genre in which you could evoke, in a modern audience, the response to the story of Christ that oratorio evoked in Handel's day. Much as I treasure the original - much as I prize my tickets for tonight's performance of Messiah by Christ Church Baroque - it has never actually moved me to consider the story behind the sublime beauty of the music.

Yes, there were problems in the show, not least that the live audience played second fiddle all night to the TV crews, and was not even summoned to its feet to dance through the Hallelujah. It was certainly wrong that £700,000 of public funds was invested in what is clearly a venture with big commercial possibilities; the words from the seasonal stage thanking the Millennium Committee, chaired by Mr Seamus Brennan, sounded particularly ironic in the context of his party's deeply unChristian Budget.

The ebacle debacle over the recording rights must be solved so that the money returns to Irish music, to honour the thousands of ill-paid musicians who have kept Handel's name alive here for 250 years, and so that the new version can be enjoyed without any injury to the original's place in our hearts.

Victoria White is Arts Editor of The Irish Times