Looking ahead to Welsh National Opera's new season based on the theme of faith, the Orchestra of WNO under music director Lothar Koenigs played music by Messiaen and Bruckner, whose profound Catholicism was the foundation of their creativity. Ironic, then, that the concert's start became a question of a wing and a prayer: the delayed arrival of the emergency replacement for an indisposed oboist held things up for 40 minutes. The audience mood was one of good-natured resignation, but it did rather put a dampener on the performance.

Not in terms of volume, it must be said: St David's Hall resounded as magnificently as a cathedral to Messiaen's early work L'Ascension, with the brass chorale radiantly ablaze in the first and third meditations and with the cor anglais solo evoking a mistily plaintive tone in the second meditation, Alléluias Sereins d'une Ame Qui Désire le Ciel.

Both Messiaen and Bruckner were organists, manifestly an influence on the way they conceived their music as well as their method of instrumentation in the manner of organ registrations. Experiencing Messiaen's terraces of sound handed through the different orchestral sections in L'Ascension inevitably drew attention to the same tendency in Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, albeit a late work in which Bruckner's approach was at its most sophisticated.

Koenigs brought a majestic, Wagnerian sweep to the big phrases, if not to the overall organic flow. It was in the finale – a synthesis of all that had gone before and, for Bruckner himself, the most significant of his life – that Koenigs marshalled his forces most convincingly. Yet the fact that the crucial Adagio, which embodies the greatest fervour, was somewhat lacking in soul denied the work its ultimate impact and the sense of spiritual uplift.

• 24 May until 21 June. Box office: 029 2063 5000. Event website.