An opera's not over until the fat lady sings. This wasn't an opera then: there were no musicians, just five pianos' innards, three pools of water, skeletal trees, lights and smoke, video projections, the voices of Malcolm X, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Colombian Indians, guys at the back with a bank of technology and two stage hands sifting crystals or turning on taps.

Experienced voyagers to art's cutting edge will realise that I can only be describing a new presentation by Heiner Goebbels, the multimedia maverick of contemporary music. The 75 minutes of Stifters Dinge (“Stifter's Things” in English) may not have the crazy glow of his Hashirigaki, a Barbican hit six years ago, but you have to bow before any piece that manages without effort to be theatre, music and art installation all at once.

It was commissioned by Artangel and Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne. The venue is extraordinary. Who would have thought that across from Madame Tussaud's lay the 14,000 sq ft of an underground hangar, once used to test concrete for Spaghetti Junction and the Channel Tunnel?

To the 19th-century romantic writer Adalbert Stifter, a microscopic describer of forest trees, the newest project space in London, P3, would be absolute hell. Yet there his “things” were, rubbing alongside in a loose collage: a Stifter text about ice on pine trees, Lévi-Strauss babbling, Paolo Ucello's painting Night Hunt and, at the water's far end, a cityscape cum musical box with automatically operated pianos and Heath Robinson devices plonking, jangling, musing on Bach or vacuous pop. You can't really call Goebbels a composer; call him a decomposer instead.

The meaning? Goebbels leaves that to the audience: an iffy strategy when the lack of sonic and aural glue creates a show largely stripped of drama until the piano cityscape rolls toward the audience, jangling fit to burst. I took home an ecological message. I also left thinking that for all the show's dazzling technology and conceptual beauty, it's a pity when adventurous mind-tickling art leaves your heart flat as a pancake.

To April 27. www.seetickets.com

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