Bonking on a big screen above the musicians’ heads. The f-word declaimed with relish by a solo soprano. An electric guitar or two on stage. My goodness, the Hallé Orchestra’s concerts have changed a bit since Sir John Barbirolli’s day.

Of course this was no ordinary Hallé concert, but the latest genre-busting premiere in the Manchester International Festival. And an epic multinational effort it was, too: a Russian composer’s concert adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s sprawling novel about a tragic love-triangle involving two Bombay rock stars and a voyeuristic photographer. It included a silent film, quirkily shadowing the action, by the British director Mike Figgis, while on the platform Alan Rickman narrated the story and two singers took the parts of the main protagonists.

Complicated? Perhaps. But Rushdie’s novel is itself a many-layered thing: a magic-realist fable, echoing the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, that evokes the glad 1950s dawn of rock music, its hedonistic heyday, and then its slow crumble into cynicism and sterility. To condense all that into 90 action-packed minutes, yet tell the story so lucidly and movingly, was a considerable achievement on the part of the composer, Victoria Borisova-Ollas, and her librettist, Edward Kemp.

But what many in the audience may have found odd, and perhaps disappointing, was how little genuine-sounding rock music found its way into this rock-world fable. Borisova-Ollas’s lushly cinematic score has its estimable features. It is orchestrated deftly, and infused with a soaring-string lyricism that harks back to Prokofiev or even Tchaikovsky. And it is capable of portraying not only intimate moments of lovemaking but also the earthquake that swallows up Vima, the wayward rock-chick who is the story’s “Eurydice” figure.

But what Borisova-Ollas doesn’t have in her armoury (despite her faltering use of electric guitars and drums) is a convincing pastiche of 1960s or 1970s rock. The big apocalyptic number at the end – which, like the show, is also called The Ground Beneath her Feet – is certainly a memorably moody ballad, but it’s closer in style to the Fauré Requiem than to anything from the Doors or the Stones.

Similarly, the classically-trained soloists – the soprano Loré Lixenberg and baritone James McOran-Campbell – never quite convinced as rock gods, though both worked hard to put over the text. But Rickman was splendidly sardonic as the narrator, and the conductor Mark Elder paced the frenetic drama effectively. If nothing else The Ground reminds us that, with enough thought, serious orchestral concerts can be given a pertinent visual dimension.

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette