Turning philosophy into opera isn't guaranteed to produce anything exciting even when a production is about the best one could hope for.

This is the case with WNO's beautiful staging of Jonathan Harvey's Wagner Dream, sixteen months after its first UK performance as a concert piece.

Director Pierre Audi and designer Jean Kalman create an understated UK stage premiere which sits thematically but somewhat oddly with the 'dream' theme of the company's summer season. The other offerings are Wagner's Lohengrin and Puccini's Madam Butterfly.

Harvey, who died last December, was a Christian-turned-Buddhist, and in Wagner Dream the dying but ever egocentric composer of sprawling music-dramas imagines the opera he intended to write about the Buddha.

Even the volatile Wagner, a spoken role played by Gerhard Brossner, and the downstage mini-drama also involving his wife Cosima (Karin Giegerich) and a visiting singer (Ulrike Sophie Rindermann) with whom he would customarily have had his way, cannot be sustained for long as compelling theatre.

It's well, then, that he lapses into reverie, which is enacted on an elevated stage above an on-stage orchestra and pit singers, while Harvey's kaleidoscopic soundscape in its computerised manifestation swirls seductively about the auditorium under conductor Nicholas Collon's undemonstrative control.

Wagner's saffron dream is a story of love, reincarnation and Buddhist cessation. It's sung divinely by David Stout (Buddha), Richard Wiegold (Vairochana), Claire Booth (Pakati), Robin Tritschler (Ananda) and the rest of the opera-within-an-opera of characters on route to Siddhartha's Eightfold Path. There are striking video back projections and a libretto spoken and sung in German, Sanskrit and Pali, a threatened Sanskrit dialect, with no mean panache.

An opera worth doing? Definitely.