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Some of Bach's best work was written for tiny audiences in intimate spaces. What happened when Zaha Hadid was asked to create a 21st-century concert space for his music at the Manchester international festival?

Last year, the architect Zaha Hadid was invited to design a space ­specifically for the ­performance of solo Bach – a 21st-century version of the kind of salon where the great ­patrons of the 18th century might have listened to music they had commissioned. Her brief, from the director of the Manchester international festival, Alex Poots, was that the space should come close to creating the perfect ­conditions for the music to be heard; after all, Bach's exquisite, complex solo partitas and sonatas were originally written for small audiences, to be ­performed in intimate environments – not giant concert halls.

But when I met Hadid last month, she was characteristically dismissive of this brief, and any connection the ­resulting structure might bear to the music it was designed for (even if an early sketch featured elements reminiscent of a musical stave). "Obviously for some ­people there is a big connection between ­music and the way you can create a space," she says. "But we didn't really do that – we didn't do ­anything like ­literally translate a score into a design." She adds, rather ­crushingly: "That sort of thing was fashionable 25 years ago."

Hadid recently had a nasty fall, in Cairo – "in my hotel on the marble floor, after days of stepping carefully through rubble" – so she receives me at her home in ­London, rather than in her nearby office. In the centre of the enormous, white reception room lie confusingly jagged pieces of furniture, like shards of glass or icicles. Hadid – 58, black-clad, made up with a streak of startling fuchsia lipstick – sits ­behind a more conventional desk. Melodie ­Leung, her project architect for the Manchester space – one of the team charged with translating Hadid's ideas and sketches into an actual structure – talks me through the plans. Hadid (who often, during our conversation, strays on to other subjects, such as the uncanny similarities between Korean and ­Turkish ice cream) casts a beady eye. Wouldn't it be better, she asks, to have a scattering of coloured chairs, rather than the black ones shown? (These are to be Verner Panton "S" chairs, exactly like the ones we are ­sitting on now.) Leung delicately ­deflects this; the deadline for ordering chairs has long passed. "They were ­always going to be black, right from her earliest drawings," she tells me later. One suspects Hadid's team are very used to dealing with this kind of last-minute change of heart.

For an architect who is a household name in Britain, this temporary ­structure in Manchester will represent a relatively rare opportunity to see her work. (It will be open to the public ­between concerts during the festival, and then until September, before travelling to the Holland festival next June, where it will also host Bach recitals.) Hadid is, of course, currently at work on a much bigger building, the Aquatics Centre for the 2012 London Olympics, as well as a revamped transport ­museum for Glasgow. But her built work in this country comprises a mere handful of projects: a number of ­temporary pavilions, a house in east London and a Maggie's Centre in Fife.

This week, the new space has been taking shape, ready for a series of concerts for solo piano, cello and violin that start on Friday. On the top floor of the grand, neoclassical Manchester Art Gallery, in a cavernous room usually ­reserved for temporary exhibitions, Hadid's team have been building a tiny concert hall – a space within a space. It will seat just 192 lucky people, for nine evening concerts by pianist Piotr ­Anderszewski, cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras and violinist Alina Ibragimova – as well as free lunchtime recitals by students at Chetham's School of Music and the Royal Northern College of ­Music. "It is almost like being in a ­cocoon," Hadid says of the curving, ­enveloping forms that now wind through the gallery. "If you are in a fluid space, the impact created is very different. The impression is more ­complex. You are perhaps more enclosed [than in a standard, rectangular concert hall], but in a soft way."

The structure is alluringly simple – a performance space demarcated and enclosed by a single, deep ribbon of fabric, attached to a steel frame. This floats out of a back corner of the ­gallery and snakes around until it ­finally curls to the floor; along the way, it quietly performs a number of acoustic functions, creating surfaces above and behind the stage for the sound to bounce off. The fabric is an extremely stretchy white Lycra, the kind of thing cyclists wear, chopped into large ­panels by a skilful pattern-cutter based in Bristol. Leung tells me the manufacturers have suggested it be given a last-minute clean with the ­inside of a baguette, an old trick used by wedding-dress makers. "We said, 'Can it be ordinary white bread?' and they said, 'No, it has to be French ­baguettes.'" The overall effect is like sails swollen by a high wind, or a gymnast's ribbon frozen into an elegantly arcing spiral. There is an impression of great lightness. Leung explains: "It's never a ­linear inspiration process for Zaha, but the ribbon is an architectural motif that's very flexible. It creates a space – it performs, if you like."

Hadid's architects have worked closely with acousticians: Mark Howarth and Michael Whitcroft, of Manchester-based Sandy Brown ­Associates, have tested different ­versions of the design in scale-model versions and suggested adjustments accordingly. The gallery itself has also had a bit of work done to bring it up to scratch as a space for ­music – filling up holes in the ceiling, for instance.

In the end, however gorgeous the space looks, it will fail as a concert venue unless its acoustics work. I ask Poots how musicians reacted when he invited them to come and perform in this untried, experimental space. The first person he approached was ­Anderszewski, the acclaimed Polish-born pianist, described by the ­Guardian's Andrew Clements as "the perfect conduit" for Bach's partitas. "He agreed in a matter of days," Poots says. "I think because he knew we were taking the music seriously. The others agreed very quickly – I think they knew they would be in good company. In the end, it's not so often in the classical world that something like this is created for the music that they love."

It has often been argued that classical music ­cannot easily be taken out of the ­concert hall, because of its rigorous acoustic requirements – a shame, given that some of the most memorable drama and visual art of recent years has been site-specific, created outside traditional galleries or theatres. If ­Hadid's installation works, it could point the way forward to more imaginative ways of experiencing classical music. This light-as-egg-white, oddly comforting space has a lot to prove.

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