NO OTHER new opera of recent years has quite matched the success of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin. Premiered at the Salzburg Festival two years ago, it has travelled to Paris and Santa Fe, building up a considerable reputation before arriving for this single concert performance at the Barbican.

Everywhere else it has been seen in Peter Sellars’s reportedly magical production, and if the lack of staging here threatened to look like another typically under-funded British compromise it did not turn out that way: the hypnotic musical performance meant that anything else might have got in the way.

Saariaho’s score combines with a poetic libretto by the Lebanese-born writer Armin Maalouf to exquisite effect, though some might equally describe the effect as exquisitely boring. It is not, it must be said, the most dramatic opera, but then neither is Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, another piece where the music works powerfully on the imagination.

In terms of subject matter, the Saariaho-Maalouf work, which translates as “Love from afar”, also belongs to the tradition of Debussy’s Pelléas et Melisande. The five connected scenes are inspired by the tale of a medieval Provencal troubadour called Jaufre, who visualises the Countess Clemence of Tripoli as the epitome of chaste love. A Pilgrim criss-crosses the Mediterranean carrying messages between the two distant lovers, but when Jaufre finally summons up the courage to sail to Tripoli he is taken ill while at sea and dies on arrival in the arms of Clemence.

Saariaho has declared herself disinterested in the concept of courtly love, and said that for her the story has modern resonance while also being a wider meditation on love. Her delicate music reflects this in the same way that Maalouf is able, like Edward Said, to look beyond the clichés of Orientalism.

Somehow the perfumed music, scored for large orchestra, glassy electronics and chorus (the excellent London Voices), evokes both the ancient and exotic worlds. Yet they are wrapped up in a bigger sound-picture that transports each listener individually.

The American conductor Robert Spano was making a welcome appearance here in charge of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and shaped a sensitive performance out of the coiling melodies and richly woven textures. Even with little dramatic contrast, the music has its own integrity, at least when performed with such conviction.

With his soft-grained baritone and gentle yet ardent presence, Gerald Finley was well cast as the troubadour. Beth Clayton disclosed a pearly mezzo as the Pilgrim go-between. Having created the role and repeated it everywhere else, Dawn Upshaw was a compelling Clemence; her bright soprano can lack emotional charge in other contexts, but here she negotiated the melismatic lines with angelic ease and was powerful in her final rage against God.