Pet Shop Boys release 'A Man From The Future' about Alan Turing
The work with Turing biographer Andrew Hodges, premiered at the BBC Proms in 2014, has been newly recorded for Parlophone – with Juliet Stevenson as narrator.
Archive image · Photo: Ceoil / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Pet Shop Boys released 'A Man From The Future' on Parlophone on 9 October. In eight chapters, the work combines songs, spoken word and electronic and orchestral music to tell the life and death of Alan Turing – the British mathematician and cryptanalyst who laid the foundations of modern computing. It was created with Turing biographer Andrew Hodges, premiered at the BBC Proms in 2014 and has since been revised.
For the new version, actor Juliet Stevenson reads the narration, the Manchester Camerata Octet plays string arrangements by Sven Helbig, and the Manchester Grammar School boys' choir sings. It was recorded in London, Manchester and Berlin; Pet Shop Boys produced it with Helbig, and it was mixed and mastered in Germany.
The eight pieces run from 'Natural wonders every child should know' via 'The Enigma' and 'The trial' to the title piece. Before the release, the BBC broadcast the complete work on radio on 4 October, and on 8 October the band and Hodges presented it at the Imperial War Museum in Manchester.