Mittwoch aus Licht, Birmingham Opera Company

Singing camels, paddling trombonists, airborne string quartets and a libretto so barmy it makes David Icke sound like Richard Dawkins. Birmingham, welcome to the world of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The German composer devoted 25 years of his life composing his giant, seven-day, operatic cycle Licht. We in Britain have only ever had the chance to see one segment when in 1984 Donnerstag aus Licht was premiered at the Royal Opera House. The rest have slowly reached the light of day. Mittwoch aus Licht finally received its world premiere last night. But it has been a tortuous path for all of them. Not only is this because the demands of the Licht operas are prohibitively expensive and notoriously complicated. It's also because the jury's still out on whether any of them are actually any good.

For many, Stockhausen's slide into an unattractive cultish spirituality - comprehensively catalogued in Licht - disqualifies the cycle from serious study. Much of the musical establishment (most of whom were absent at the world premiere last night interestingly enough) distanced themselves from this phase of Stockhausen's career. For Graham Vick and the Birmingham Opera Company to take on Mittwoch and for the Cultural Olympiad to get behind it so enthusiastically was perhaps more than a bit of a gamble. But it paid off.

Virtuosically distributing the six-hour action across every square inch of two vast concrete warehouses, Graham Vick is largely responsible for making it work. He did this not by making sense of the cosmic guff or by shaping it as a mystery play in the style of Carl Orff's late paeans to the Christian firmament (the operas that Mittwoch most resembles) but instead by presenting the work's increasingly deranged scenarios as the descent of a religious cult into madness.

Judge the work on the last 60 minutes and you'd have to conclude that the whole thing was a self-indulgent and ill-making farce

A group of believers arise from among the audience at the start, seemingly called to action by the phantasmagoric electronic mist that is Stockhausen's Mittwoch Gruss (Wednesday Greeting). In distant corners of the warehouse activities of greater and greater oddness are snapped. A fraternity appears to build up. There's argument, ablutions, a man practises his sword skills. A group of heavily pregnant women march in formation behind pillars. 

Following these shadowy beginnings, we are invited to enter the bright daylight of the second warehouse space where it seems the believers have convened a parliament for the First Act. A UN chamber of delegates from around the world sit perched atop a circle of high chairs, their faces caked in the colours of their respective national flags, their subject: love. Stockhausen gives voice and choreography to the delegates, thrillingly releasing the inherent theatricality of the parliamentary act. Ex Cathedra, under their director Jeffrey Skidmore, a choir better known for their excavation of Baroque eccentricities, ululated and chanted with immense power and precision, and conjured a sustainably captivating theatre from thin air.