The Southbank Centre’s bold, extended festival celebrating the music of that avant-garde pioneer Luigi Nono (1924-90) closed with his most uncompromising work, Prometeo (1984), given on consecutive nights at the Festival Hall, the first performance being the belated British premiere.

It is one of those pieces always described with a certain awe. For a start, it lasts nearly 2½ hours and runs without a break, though unauthorised pauses were inserted between the nine movements on this occasion. As a challenge to the audience’s bladder, it is on a par with the unbroken spans of Wagner’s Das Rheingold and Henze’s The Bassarids, but there are few composers who can remould our perception of time as persuasively as Wagner. Nono’s music always makes a strenuous demand on us, makes a fetish of the concentration required to follow a pattern of notes. But, though he was surely right to assume that this faculty is increasingly threatened in the modern, commercialised world, our ability to listen is not the same as our willingness to do so; and it is rather outrageous, as well as provocative, of him to subtitle this work “a tragedy of listening”.

The description does, however, have a concision. The work is a tragedy in the Greek sense – concerned with Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and had his liver chewed out by an eagle in perpetuity - and it is through a new and awesome approach to “listening” that the tale is told (the allusive libretto is by Massimo Cacciari). The performing forces - the London Sinfonietta and Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble combined, the Synergy Vocals choir and a couple of narrators (who soon fade from the picture) - are dotted round the hall, only some of them on the platform. Some are in the side stalls or hidden in those sheerly ascending RFH boxes that resemble matchbox drawers, and all the sound is amplified, mixed and redistributed by a live electronics unit, over which presides André Richard, a colleague of Nono. Prometeo requires not one but two conductors - Diego Masson and Patrick Bailey, standing on the platform near each other, beating different time. Conventional listening “in a straight line” is thus completely dethroned. Sound comes at you from every angle, and you can only intermittently see its source.

For Stravinsky, looking at musicians was a constitutive part of listening to them (how often, when one tries shutting one’s eyes at concerts, does one not simply start to nod off?), but, for Nono, a 360-degree sound perception seems to have been tantamount to a spiritually purifying, democratically elevating renaissance of the soul. We must not accept our listening limitations as tragic, but jolly well try harder. The problem is that what he gives us to listen to is so monotonous. Sometimes literally one tone, long sustained. Most often, the discourse comprises quiet, glassy, free-floating dissonances for voices and instruments, interspersed with glass-shattering instrumental explosions. Other contrast is at a premium, but the first of two Interludes is scored just for soprano, flute and horn, the section called Hölderlin (the text here, as everywhere else, is deliberately impossible to follow) was like a flock of angry birds, and Three Voices had a Rheingold-like low rumble.

Electronics added their nimbus, but the austerity of texture and solemnity of tone were hard going. There are no sops to the merely curious: no hypnotic beauty, such as a comparably prolonged and austere work by Morton Feldman would offer; no dramatisation of divergent time-streams, as in Stockhausen’s Gruppen, with its three conductors. You are clearly meant to give your all to the piece - and the large (second-night) audience was amazingly attentive - but, for me, this study in listening was not so much a luminous personal transport as a reminder of dictation exercises in school music lessons. There was plenty of time to pick out intervals. Lots of bare ecclesiastical fifths.

Whatever one thinks of Nono, he is like nobody else, and the other premieres I caught during the week seemed, by comparison, not new at all. Even the deep-dyed modernism of Matthias Pintscher’s brilliantly orchestrated Osiris, played by the London Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Boulez at the Barbican, sounded gaudy after Nono’s fanatical formalism.

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