Mittwoch aus Licht – review

Karlheinz Stockhausen spent 27 years composing the seven operas, one for each day of the week, that make up his monumental Licht cycle.

He finished the whole work in 2004, and while every individual scene of each opera had been commissioned and performed separately over the years, by the time he died three years later, he had also been able to see all but two of the operas complete on stage.

Cologne Opera put on one of the missing ones, Sonntag aus Licht (Sunday from Light) last year; now, as part of the London 2012 festival, Birmingham Opera Company has added the final piece to the Licht jigsaw, with Graham Vick's production of Mittwoch (Wednesday).

Vick's staging is a triumph of logistics above all, for some had pronounced this profoundly strange yet hugely ambitious work with its sometimes fantastical dramatic conceits, as unstageable.

This performance in the cavernous spaces of the disused chemical factory that appears to have become BOC's home lasts well over six hours.

It would be wrong to say the time flies, but in almost every scene there is enough musical interest at least to justify the sheer effort of putting it all on.

Mittwoch aus Licht consists of four scenes, framed by a purely electronic Greeting and Farewell.

It's famous, notorious even, for including as one of those scenes the Helicopter Quartet, first performed in 1995, in which the four members of a string quartet take to the skies with their instruments in four helicopters, and sound and video images of their aerial playing is transmitted to the audience on the ground.

Here it was the Elysian Quartet who got to go aloft, but musically and dramatically it is the least interesting element in the work; the combination of the quartet's almost constant tremolandos with the sound of the helicopter rotors creates a kind of continuum that is punctuated by bow attacks and cries from the players, but little else.

How the Helicopter Quartet fits in to the dramatic plan of Mittwoch is secondary, for Stockhausen's concept of opera is much closer to the medieval idea of tableaux than to anything paraded under the operatic banner in the last 400 years.

There's no narrative thread, not even strong thematic links between the scenes, except very generalised symbolic ones.

In Stockhausen's grand scheme, Wednesday is the day of reconciliation between Michael, Eve and Lucifer, the three archetypal characters who appear in all seven operas, and two of the scenes of Mittwoch at least deal with that theme of reconciliation in their own zany fashion – the extraordinary a capella World Parliament, wonderfully performed by the Birmingham-based choir Ex Cathedra perched high in umpires' chairs around the edge of the performing space, and the bizarre Michaelion, in which a camel defecates planets, dances to a trombone and is hailed as a possible new president of galactic headquarters.

However naive the dramaturgy or child-like the humour, Vick respects it and never tries to impose an extra veneer of sophistication.

His production sometimes does a bit too much, especially when it tries to make Mittwoch into the kind of community-based production with masses of extras that has become BOC's stock-in-trade, but otherwise the staging is wonderfully fluent and performed with tremendous panache by a mix of professional and amateur actors, singers and instrumentalists, with Stockhausen's former assistant Kathinka Pasveer controlling the sound projection.

What saves it all from becoming just a parade of weird images and pretentious ideas is the sheer power and grandeur of much of Stockhausen's music, with moments that recall his fiercely original works of the 1960s and 70s, and especially the electronic music, which no other composer could have come close to matching.

Until Saturday 25 August. Box office: 0121 246 6632