Shostakovich earned a crust improvising piano accompaniment to silent films. So too does Michael Nyman, whose appearance at the AV Festival saw him at the piano playing along to Jean Vigo's classic 1920s short, A Propos de Nice.

Nyman responds to Vigo's artfully framed montages of golden sands, glittering seas and gorgeous yachts by pulling out a stock succession of his soporific rippling rhythm figures. At one point the film lingers over a sequence of sun-lovers snoozing in deckchairs, as if Nyman has managed the remarkable feat of sending the people on screen to sleep.

The second half of the programme is a collaboration between Nyman and video artists Yeast, entitled Orchestrating the Genome. It features a suite of extracts from Nyman's opera Facing Goya - being heard for the first time in the UK - accompanied by a show of photographs the composer has taken of people beside a hot-dog stall and outside a McDonald's restaurant. The video designers claim to be interested in "the diversity of these people and how that contrasts with the monoculture of genetic modification and iconic textures inspired by the corporatisation of DNA", which seems a very long-winded reason for taking pictures of people at fast food joints.

Northern Sinfonia play the piece with disengaged competence. Conductor David Lockington's beat could not be stricter if he were wearing bondage gear, while Hilary Summers and Sarah Leonard do their best to get their mouths around Nyman's ungainly word setting.

In short doses, Nyman's methods can be quite compelling, yet the concluding image of Facing Goya is that of the artist's skull being smashed to smithereens. After an entire evening's exposure to clockwork chord progressions and mechanical dynamics, you begin to understand how that feels.