What happens when you pair one of the 20th century’s most hectic and emotionally overwhelming scores with a hyperactive animated movie? The result might easily have been an unholy mess, but what emerged from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s inspired collaboration with the multi-award-winning 1927 Studios was a triumph.

Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-symphonie is steeped in the legend of Tristan and Isolde, its 80 luxuriant minutes culminating in a joyous outpouring of sensual and spiritual love. The 100 or so musicians never balked at the work’s complexities as Vasily Petrenko guided them through the knottiest musical thickets in an unusually clear-eyed account of this most challenging of scores. Elastic tempi generated vast orgasmic peaks, and yet not one of the composer’s vivid colours was ever smudged. Steven Osborne, an old hand at the fiendish solo piano part, was particularly impressive in the glittering cadenzas with Cécile Lartigau’s eerie glissandos on the ondes Martenot cutting cleanly through the orchestral maelstrom.

The film, a witty homage to the golden age of silent movies, was projected on a screen above the stage. With its feverish narrative of reluctant brides, doughty knights, jealous kings and lascivious knaves, it seemed at first that it might overwhelm the music. By the second movement, however, it had become apparent that the visual action was preternaturally attuned to the score’s expressive heartbeat. Between the film-makers and Petrenko, musical edifice and dramatic action were so precisely synced that it was impossible not to relax, sit back and enjoy the ride.

And what a visual feast it was. The restless, slyly knowing imagery combined live-action character work echoing the wide-eyed mannerisms of Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks and Lon Chaney, with surreal stop-motion collages that wouldn’t have felt out of place in an episode of Monty Python. At one point, Petrenko, who had somehow managed to find his way into the film, turned to the audience and winked. At another, blood-red roses sprouted from out of the ecstatic lovers’ every available orifice. The genius of it all was how such deliberately lighthearted and playful visuals managed to be so perfectly in tune with Messiaen’s seriously intoxicating music.