Huddled around the plunging red orifice in the centre of Anish Kapoor’s Dismemberment of Jeanne d’Arc installation, the half-standing half-seated audience chatted anxiously as the sound of tuning instruments began to meld with the backdrop of cars ripping down Grand Parade and the eerie swell of the breeze in the rafters of the decaying Old Municipal Market.

After flicking through the multiple depictions of Jeanne d’Arc in the programme, alongside exhaustive literature on Rossini’s little-known composition for piano and voice – here adapted for orchestra and mezzo-soprano by Salvatore Sciarrino – it was easy to fear we were on the verge of tumbling into a metaphorical red hole of pretension.

But much like Kapoor’s work, some things are just extraordinary regardless of meaning.

Poised on the edge of a parapet between the installation’s “mounds”, elevated above the Chamber Domaine orchestra, singer Anna Grevelius, dressed in white, exuded a riveting mood of sincere, entirely non- histrionic euphoria in both voice and physicality.

The piece itself was as beautiful as it was tantalisingly brief – running only 30 minutes. It was aided by the raw acoustics of the market, which offered the auditory grandeur of a concert hall scale space, minus the “captured for your convenience” roundness to the sound, leaving the music to flood and flow indiscriminately to find its release.

I’m not sure the work necessitated reflection on the mythology of Jeanne d’Arc, but standing beside the giant dismembered limbs, watching Grevelius gaze imploringly up to the heavens, her voice reverberating throughout the dilapidated building, the sensory envelopment was strangely profound.