It has taken 24 years for Luigi Nono's vast sound-drama Prometeo to achieve its first performance in Britain. The world premiere, in the church of San Lorenzo, Venice, caused a sensation; but this huge happening, with its three- dimensional soundscape and its oblique references to Hölderlin Nietzsche, Rilke and Walter Benjamin, has perhaps proved just too physically and intellectually intractable for our little isle.

So all praise to the South Bank's Nono festival for daring to programme it as the grand finale. The score is almost a meter square, and the performers - who included the London Sinfonietta, the Royal Academy Manson Ensemble, Synergy Vocals, two narrators and a vast desk of technological electronica (the Experimental Studio for Acoustic Arts, Freiburg, directed by Andre Richard) - were positioned all over the hall, leaving only the central stalls for the audience's sensurround experience.

The myth of Prometheus is ubiquitous but invisible. There is no narrative thread in the compilation of texts; and the words (printed in the programme) are reduced to vowels, consonants, syllables, all cut, spliced and layered as pure sound. The myth is apprehended, not comprehended. Listening itself is transformed.

The work's continuous 140 minutes divide into sections: Prologue, Islands (these are the discernible crisis points in a pungently slow and hushed work), Interludes and Stasimons - the latter a reference to the chant in Greek tragedy. Voices circle like stars in a planetarium; and the two conductors (Patrick Bailey and Diego Masson) seem like magi, conjuring rather than directing performance. Moments of suspended vocal beauty are crushed by fearful striations of brass, in what Claudio Abbado, the work's first conductor, has called an “eternal cycle”.

The Festival Hall, of all Prometeo's venues, must be the most abstract, providing no evocative atmosphere except, perhaps, that of a recording studio. So Prometeo had to stand alone; and at times it seemed more like a work of modernist reference than an overwhelming emotional experience. But, on coming out into a London Saturday night, it was palpably clear that any work that can resensitise and refocus the human spirit, presenting listening as understanding rather than as distraction, can't be all bad.

Explore Music

• Proms

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

Editor's choice

• The top 10 fan versus band scuffles
• Mamma Mia! The first review
• Times critics' 20 best films for kids