Those who prefer historically authentic performance would have it that Bach's solo keyboard works should not be played on a modern piano. They might also have something to say about them being played in a space-age white Lycra windsock; but Zaha Hadid's contribution to the second Manchester International Festival is a sound installation whose sound is supplied by some of the world's leading Bach exponents.
It is not the first time Hadid has tried to design an environment for listening to music: her design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House was rejected in favour of the less radical Millennium Centre. Her bespoke listening booth, cocooned in one of Manchester Art Gallery's temporary exhibition spaces, has an airy, ephemeral feel. Taut, elasticised fabric swirls round the monochrome performance arena like cream into coffee. It's smaller than you might expect and a little flimsy - bringing to mind the old Top of the Pops studio - and though Hadid insists the design bears no structural relationship with Bach's music, the shell enclosure makes you begin to appreciate how a cochlear implant must feel.
Whether it acoustically enhances the performance is impossible to say - one suspects the impact is visual rather than aural - but it does have the benefit of enfolding the audience and making you feel part of the performance. And it affords the rare privilege of creating a close encounter with Piotr Anderszewski. There are few finer interpreters of Bach's Suites and Partitas than this breathtakingly inventive and unpretentious young artist who seems to have inherited the pianistic intelligence of the great Bach players but none of the neuroses. He plunges into the turbulent dissonance of Partita No 2 in C minor, chopping through the andante with a dry, percussive tone purged of ornamentation.
It's almost shockingly austere, though as Anderszewski moves on to Partita No 6 in E minor he allows his tone to expand mournfully throughout the tragic Sarabande. The English Suite No 6 in D minor is an earlier and less fiendishly dextrous piece whose roots in simple dance forms are more clearly perceptible. Anderszewski emphasises this with some expressive foot-stomping. Perhaps if Hadid were to create a new space for the reinterpretation of Bach, she should have designed a dance-floor.
• Perfs 4 & 5 July (0844 815 4967)
• Installation runs to 18 July.
