What a hoot! Here is a ludicrous opera that keeps the audience waiting four long hours to see its hapless lovers brought together and then sends them plunging to their doom in the last two minutes, when a rival cuts their rope ladder of escape. If only he had used his scissors a little earlier.

No wonder the Royal Opera decided to present Donizetti's Dom Sébastien in concert performances. A staged production would surely have everybody rolling in the aisles at the improbable twists and turns of Eugène Scribe's libretto, whereas this concert version made quite a strong start to the 2005/6 season.

The rarely heard (and even less often seen) Dom Sébastien was Donizetti's last opera. Trying to score a success with the fickle public in Paris, he chose a story that promised to tickle their fancy - a Gallic mixture of sex and religion, set partly in the exotic Moorish lands of north Africa, where France was engaged in military campaigns - and, not surprisingly for 1843, never mind political correctness. "Blood!" declare the Moorish troops. "That is the law of the Prophet."

A top jockey was needed to get this creaky old warhorse off the starting block and the Royal Opera had one in Mark Elder, who conducted like a man possessed. Under his galvanising baton the orchestra and chorus of the Royal Opera sounded on top form, leading one to think how inventive and forward- looking much of Donizetti's music in this late opera is.

The promising young Italian tenor Giuseppe Filianoti displayed exemplary style in the title role, notwithstanding one unfortunate Alpine yodel at a crucial moment. Simon Keenlyside roared without respite as the chieftain Abayaldos and Alastair Miles brooded threateningly as the face of the Spanish Inquisition. As Zayda, either Vesselina Kasarova had spent months perfecting an outlandishly Moorish accent or she always does turn the French language into a thick African soup. But then, with a story like this, nobody was likely to mind.

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