As well as being a leading theoretical physicist, Brian Greene is an ardent scientific populariser, with a number of best-selling books to his name including the children's book, Icarus at the Edge of Time, published two years ago. But Greene always envisaged that Icarus could become a work for the concert hall, too; "a Peter and the Wolf for the 21st century" as he puts it. Philip Glass has composed the score, film-makers Al+Al have created the visuals and the result was first performed in New York last month. It came to Europe, with the London Philharmonic conducted by Marin Alsop and David Morrissey as narrator, as one of the Southbank Centre's events marking the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society.

Icarus is a boy on a spaceship making the first interstellar journey. Defying his father, he takes off in a homemade spacecraft to investigate a passing black hole, forgetting that general relativity predicts that the massive gravitational fields in the vicinity of such objects slow down time drastically. When he returns to the mother ship, he discovers that 10,000 Earth years have elapsed and he is in the middle of an interstellar highway, having become a mythical figure, just like the classical Icarus.

Greene's narrative, adapted in collaboration with David Henry Hwang, is neat, with the scientific points well made, while the film images nicely mix fantasy with something more realistic. Yet it never quite gels as a concert piece. Glass's music is fluent but generalised, like the scores he wrote in the 1980s for Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy. The musical element never takes the story forward, so the piece fails to become more than a film with spoken narrative and pretty music in the background.