Michelangelo Sonnets, Manchester International Festival, review For an outfit as self-consciously cutting-edge as the Manchester International Festival, the directorial debut of Peter Sellars is not so much belated as just plain late. This American maverick has been sprinkling his Puckish brand of stage magic around gullible venues for at least three decades now, and with diminishing returns: his specially-commissioned MIF show, Michelangelo Sonnets, has all the freshness of yesterday's mashed potatoes. The Michelangelo settings in question are not Britten's relatively well-known songs but Shostakovich's Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti, an enigmatic cycle of 11 sonnets dating from 1974, the penultimate year of the Russian composer's life. Morbid yet hauntingly beautiful and ultimately transcendent, they are sung here by the American bass-baritone Eric Owens, whose artistry is beyond question but whose willingness to team up with Sellars is not. On purely musical terms, Owens is outstanding. His voice is rich and noble, his phrasing eloquent, and it is not simply the Michelangelo context that makes it sound as if he is sculpting his firm lines. He projects Abram Efros's Russian translations with great sensitivity. The organist Cameron Carpenter is also making musical headlines at Manchester's Albert Hall, a former Wesleyan chapel that is being opened here to the public for the first time in four decades and is due to be inaugurated as a full-time performance space next year. Another American original, this "Liberace of the organ" fills out the piano part with a nod towards Shostakovich's own orchestration, and manages to reinforce the questing spirituality of this music. His registrations make the final song, Immortality, even more ethereal than usual. But Sellars sabotages everything. Turning the African-American singer into a shambling janitor - no stereotyping here, then - he has him alternatively mopping the floor and then his brow, often pausing to lie down uncomfortably on the hall's hard wooden dais. At the height of some clumsily-lit business with a white sheet, Owens is forced to deliver most of a song from behind this shroud. Though presented as a complementary meditation on mortality, Bach's solo cantata Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen feels merely tacked on after an interval that destroys what flow the evening might have. Projections behind the stage of Owens's torso in close-up are probably intended to evoke Michelangelo the sculptor, but any hope of unifying the two halves is undermined by a musical performance of the Bach that is not on the level of the Shostakovich. Until Sunday July 7 (9pm) Tickets: 0844 375 2013; www.mif.co.uk