The crowd that filled every seat of this great concrete wigwam stood and cheered at the end of this performance - the premiere of John Tavener's Requiem, commissioned by Liverpool for its year as European Capital of Culture. I'm not surprised. The news that the 63-year-old composer, a frail figure at best, was in intensive care after emergency heart surgery obviously invested this concert with tremendous poignancy. But the Requiem, superbly delivered by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir under Vasily Petrenko's direction, deserves a standing ovation in its own right.

Timeless yet urgent, disarmingly simple in places, thunderously apocalyptic elsewhere, it is inexorably focused on the inevitable hour when - to quote Tavener's subtitle, borrowed from a Hindu sage - “our glory lies where we cease to exist”. And though pithy by Tavener's metaphysical standards (a mere 35 minutes) it is vast in concept.

For a start, it reflects Tavener's recent view that all religions are streams flowing from the same spring. So Hindu, Muslim, Sufi and Jewish texts all find their way into this Roman Catholic requiem liturgy. Then he deploys an astonishing array of choral and instrumental forces, Western and Eastern, around the building. As in his Protecting Veil, a solo cellist (the excellent Josephine Knight) is central - her beautiful high line forever leaping upwards like an aspiring soul.

A soprano and tenor (Elin Manahan Thomas, Andrew Kennedy) also soar stratospherically above consolatory strings; while the chorus have ecstatic Messiaen-like refrains supported by pungent brass, or extraordinary canons, dense yet strangely luminous, and often punctuated by ethereal temple bowls. Countless congregations seem to be taking up the same hymn, but on distant shores.

It's the ending, however, that contains the quintessence of Tavener. A massive choral polyphony, rising to fortissimo then falling to nothing, it simultaneously presents the same refrain in many languages. And, though the order of the notes is continually varied, the refrain somehow remains eternally the same - as in English bellringing.

The work isn't perfect; some balances seem miscalculated. But I found it overwhelmingly touching. Radio 3 broadcasts it on Wednesday at 7pm.

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