The new production of St François d'Assise by the Teatro Real may not convince the opera's detractors of its dramatic viability, but it has the great virtue of placing Messiaen's music in the foreground. Placed side by side with Hermann Nitsch's production, lately finished at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Emilia and Ilya Kabakov's 'installation' at the Madrid Arena is simple but hardly less striking.

The bold move to stage the Spanish premiere of these eight 'Scènes Franciscaines' in a tennis stadium pays off in the space afforded to the composer's vast assemblage of musicians – an orchestra of 120, chorus of 160 – and singers, who perform around and underneath a vast stained-glass cupola. The changing lights of the cupola afford all the colour, which hardly comes close to matching Messiaen's own requests for explosions and rainbows of light, but soberly refrains from Nitsch's gaudy show of Francis and his technicolor dreamboat complete with live crucifixions. The angled, empty cupola is a powerful articulation of the sound as silence that constitutes one aspect of Messiaen's creative encounter with Franciscan theology; Francis and his monks are given unusual freedom to fill the space with an intimately observed play on the politics of a religious community which is itself at once inspired by and burdened by the genius who towers above its members.

The space makes sense of the expansive tempi adopted by Sylvain Cambreling, and allows for an unprecedented degree of rhythmic articulation in the playing of the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, which was nothing short of heroic, but makes a long evening longer still: few will ever accommodate themselves to a two-hour-long second act, and his breadth sapped the tension from the climactic seventh scene where Francis receives the stigmata. There are no weak links in the cast, but the loudest cheers so far have been reserved for the Angel of Camilla Tilling, who brings an almost maternal, consoling warmth to lines that can sometimes float free of human emotion.

Filling three thousand seats for a week of performances might seem a tall order for a demanding evening, but the Teatro Real's gamble has paid off. With over 30 staged productions since its premiere in 1984, and two in the last fortnight, Saint François has utterly confounded the (mostly English-speaking) critics who have dismissed the opera as indulgently impractical, hopelessly 'unoperatic'. It's now a repertoire piece of the late 20th century. When will the Royal Opera House wake up and give UK audiences their first staging?