For a festival to stage a grand metaphysical opera pinning down the mysteries of the universe is ambitious, but to put on two such works, and back to back, is surely giving value for money. The Holland festival, founded, like Edinburgh’s, just after the war as a gateway to a brighter world, is one of the cheeriest, most forward-looking and well resourced of cultural ventures, and, under the direction of Pierre Audi, has only prospered. The two operas he brought together are the brand-new La Commedia, a five-part adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy by Holland’s leading composer, Louis Andriessen, and Messiaen’s five-hour St François d’Assise, about the life of the saint, given in Audi’s own production at the Muziektheater, in Amsterdam, by Netherlands Opera, which he is in charge of too.

La Commedia took place at the Koninklijk Theater Carré, a resplendent edifice on the banks of the Amstel, opened in 1887 as a circus space. That origin seemed appropriate to Andriessen’s piece. Subtitled a “film opera”, it makes nearly continuous use of the medium, with a fixed large screen and small ones moving up and down. The footage was shot by the production’s director, Hal Hartley, with whom Andriessen has collaborated twice before.

The orchestra, a wonderfully fresh-sounding concoction in which keyboards, cimbalom, guitars and winds dominate viola-less strings (but all is amplified, sensitively), occupies the arena as though it is the main attraction and the dramatic elements are peripheral. The percussion includes a lion’s roar, as if to symbolise this, and much of the action does indeed take place on the arena’s catwalk rim (the audience looks down vertiginously), as well as on huge, moveable scaffolding and a hydraulic lift. The orchestra (the combined Asko and Schoenberg Ensembles), chorus (Synergy Vocals) and other participants wear construction workers’ overalls. The characters on film (always monochrome) are young street musicians, shown in Amsterdam or on sand dunes, larking, smooching, getting into trouble.

Exactly what is going on, and how it fits into the Inferno-Purgatorio-Paradiso framework (the polyglot text also draws on the Dutch poet Vondel and the Old Testament), is difficult to say, and I could not help feeling the piece would work just as well with completely different imagery. Of the four sung characters, Dante is a mezzo-soprano (Cristina Zavalloni), Lucifer an actor-cabaret vocalist (Jeroen Willems) and Beatrice a radiantly high soprano (Claron McFadden). She brings the work to an end on a top D flat. But there is a joky epilogue in which a children’s chorus sings Dante’s words: “These are my notes and, if you don't understand them, you’ll never understand the Last Judgment.” The poet’s vision is brought down to earth, but one feels it has essentially been there all along.

There is nothing ethereal about this opera. Its questing vigour is of a materialist, Brechtian, Godardian kind. It relishes the mixture of media, musical quotations and parody, intellectual subtexts and ironic commentary while remaining spunkily itself — a brilliant, new-fangled circus. As a film opera, it invites comparison with Olga Neuwirth’s Lost Highway, whose recent ENO staging at the Young Vic was a marvel of technology. The difference is that the subtleties of her electroacoustic score were lost amid the mechanics of turning an actual film (by David Lynch) into theatre. Andriessen’s music — blended with Anke Brouwer’s captivating electronic soundscapes — steals the show. Whether rhythmically driven in his minimalist manner, harmonically block-like with a Stravinskian bite, flaring up like a big band or essaying startling textures, such as those produced by the lowest woodwinds dancing together, Andriessen’s score is a holiday of inventiveness and the distillation of a lifetime’s creativity. It was expertly conducted by his lifelong supporter Reinbert de Leeuw.

Along the Amstel at the modern Muziektheater, the Messiaen production proved to have more in common with the Andriessen than one would have expected. More scaffolding, even lower-pitched woodwind and, again, the players — the Residentie Orkest, divided bilaterally into string and wind choirs — in the acting area, this time at the rear of the stage, whose curving front thrusts the action into the audience (how magically intimate this large house is). “Action” is hardly the word, though, for the way the ritual, reverential, tableau-like work unfolds. Debussy’s Pelléas has a Puccinian dash by comparison with Messiaen’s utterly oblivious stasis. The first of the eight scenes (three acts) is a long conversation between François and the perpetually fearful Frère Léon (Henk Neven), conducted around a pile of holy crosses. The second is not dissimilar, with the addition of the chorus. In the third, François converses with a leper — garbed, oddly, like a leopard — who is cured with the help of an angel (the lustrously hectoring Camilla Tilling). Ninety minutes pass.

There is an awful lot to come. The sixth scene, in which François preaches to the birds, is riskily devised by Audi as an ornithology lesson for 20 small children. It was penitentially prolonged — Messiaen always knows how to pick up after a crushingly final cadence — and thinned the audience for Act III. Which was a pity, for Scene 7, where François receives the stigmata, is much the most powerful of Audi’s stage pictures — François splayed out beneath a proliferation of cross beams to which even the violin bows contributed, and the vast chorus all but mingling with the players, suggesting a crowd scene out of Eisenstein.

The oratorio texture comes as a relief after the almost sadistic monotony of Messiaen’s vocal writing: an elocutionary chant that always slows the orchestral tempo, with never an ensemble in sight, and puts great strain on the central character. (Rod Gilfry only just survived.) It is the multicoloured, madcap instrumental writing — the continuous concert of birds — that saves the work from an unbearable sanctimony, but even here, Messiaen tries our patience with a repetition of motifs well-nigh pathologically obsessive.

The conductor, Ingo Metzmacher, brought the score to bristling life, but whether the theme of transcendental empathy at the opera’s core is living or merely notional, I remain in doubt.

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