Artist News Gigs & Festivals

Pet Shop Boys to premiere new Alan Turing tribute at BBC Proms

By | Published on Friday 25 April 2014

Pet Shop Boys

Oooooh, the BBC Proms are (nearly) back (again). And the main pop-based revelation of this year’s eight-week festival, which gets going on 18 Jul, is this: an ‘orchestral work’ from the Pet Shop Boys on the life of late codebreaker and computing whizz Alan Turing.

Premiering on 23 Jul at London’s Royal Albert Hall, the 40 minute piece, titled ‘A Man From The Future’, is inspired by Turing’s time as a WW2-era codebreaker at Bletchley Park, and latter conviction for homosexual activity, for which he was royally pardoned, posthumously so, only last year.

It’ll be the centrepiece of The Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Late Night’ at the Proms, featuring beside new arrangements of classic PSB hits by Sven Helbig who collaborated with Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe on the score to the 2011 ballet, ‘The Most Incredible Thing’, and who is similarly involved in ‘A Man From The Future’.

Lowe and Tennant say: “It is an honour for us to be invited to present some new music at The Proms and to celebrate Alan Turing 60 years after his death”.

Laura Mvula, Paloma Faith and Rufus Wainwright are also part of the ‘Late Night’ pop side of the 2014 Proms, which are the last to be directed by Roger Wright, soon-to-be-ex BBC Radio 3 controller, who is leaving the Beeb as the Proms begin in July.

Look at the Proms programme in its totality, late and early night, via this link.



READ MORE ABOUT: |