"[The premiere of The Ground Beneath Her Feet] 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.

Borisova-Ollas's lushly cinematic score has its estimable features. It is orchestrated deftly ... And it is capable of portraying not only intimate moments of lovemaking but also the earthquake that swallows up Vina, the wayward rock-chick who is the story's 'Eurydice' figure."

(Richard Morrison, The Times)