Michael Nyman - The Essential (1992)

The Essential Michael Nyman Band is a studio album featuring a collection of music by Michael Nyman written for the films of Peter Greenaway and newly performed by the Michael Nyman Band. It is the seventeenth album release by Nyman. The album features liner notes by Annette Morreau, who describes the album as "a summation and digest of ten years of progress in the performance of music by a composer -- a composer with whom, so evidently, a group of friends and expert musicians intimately identify their total commitment, virtuosity, and joyous enthusiasm."

As the works on the album were written as concert pieces before being transmuted into film music, some of the selections, particularly "Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds" contain more material than their film versions, and some are very different in style, such as "An Eye for Optical Theory", with a tempo more than double from its original in The Draughtsman's Contract. The other films from which the music is derived are A Zed & Two Noughts (where it was originally not performed by the Michael Nyman Band), Drowning By Numbers, The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover, Making a Splash, and Prospero's Books.

Nyman created a similar album in 2005 with The Composer's Cut Series Vol. II: Nyman/Greenaway Revisited. Fan reaction has generally been that The Essential Michael Nyman Band is the superior album.