Parody was the term 18th-century composers used for the recycling of earlier material, and as a composer heavily influenced by the baroque it's no surprise that Michael Nyman should be an accomplished parodist. Commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Liverpool Cathedral to mark the 25th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, Nyman's 11th symphony was a premiere of sorts, though a significant proportion of its 50-minute duration was the product of rigorous repurposing.
The first movement, The Singing of the Names, was originally performed in Liverpool to mark the city's hosting of Euro 96. It took approximately 15 minutes for Merseyside-born mezzo-soprano Kathryn Rudge to intone a litany of the 96 victims in a steadily rising tessitura, and, although it is a sublimely moving conception, one only wishes it could have been shorter. The second section was a seraphic meditation reminiscent of a kyrie, angelically sung by the Philharmonic's Youth and Training Choirs. The third movement, based on subdivisions of the number 96, featured a bass line that evolved from a lugubrious cantus firmus to a swinging boogie, possibly to acknowledge Liverpool's rock'n'roll heritage.
The recycling of the final movement was more complex and ultimately more problematic. The familiar, stuttering chord cycle, borrowed from a theme by Henry Purcell, has previously been presented as a piece entitled Memorial dedicated to the victims of the Heysel stadium disaster in 1985, and subsequently reused in Peter Greenaway's film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Yet this was ultimately less a musical event than an occasion to reflect where you were at 3.06 pm on 15 April 1989. Nyman's Hillsborough memorial contains elements of pastiche, yet he has ultimately fashioned a work that goes beyond parody.
• A recording of the performance will be played in Liverpool Cathedral at 3.06pm on 6 and 25 August, and on 3 and 17 September.
