Martin Creed famously won the Turner prize in 2001 for a piece in which the lights went on and off. His latest opus, Work No 955, involves making a symphony orchestra start and stop.

Presented as part of an exhibition at the Ikon gallery, it is not the first time Creed has used music as the basis for a work. His piece for eight metronomes ticks along with the mechanical complexity of a Steve Reich experiment; and he has written hundreds of songs, none of which would challenge Schubert in their dexterity, but are often the vehicle for a musical joke: Be Natural involves the artist strumming a B chord on guitar before slipping down to B flat.

Work No 955 makes it difficult to tell whether the joke is on the audience, the orchestra, or both. Creed has written a work in which every instrument is equal. It doesn't work as a musical composition for the same reason that communism doesn't work as a social utopia - because it simply reduces everything to the same level.

But to apply conventional musical aesthetics is probably beside the point. Creed uses sound as a means of marking out space - even the lights going on and off could be considered a musical work, if you define music as a way of reminding us that time is passing.

The CBSO's dynamic new musical director Andris Nelsons honours the work with a swashbuckling performance - he looks like Errol Flynn, slashing away as if his baton were a rapier. As the piece is so short, he plays it again. It was better the first time.