Petshop Boys & Torsten Rasch

Along with the announcement of their first live album, Concrete, Petshop Boys are releasing their soundtrack for the film, Battleship Potemkin, arranged by Rasch and performed with the Dresdner Sinfoniker, and conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer. This collaboration apparently came about after Petshop Boys heard Rasch's song cycle Mein Herz Brennt:

Astralwerks has also released Pet Shop Boys original music for Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film Battleship Potemkin. The music was recorded in London and Berlin with the Dresdner Sinfoniker in 2004, with orchestrations by Torsten Rasch.

It originally premiered in 2004, when Pet Shop Boys and the Dresdner Sinfoniker played the score to accompany a screening of the film in London’s Trafalgar Square. The free event was presented by the ICA and GLA and attracted 40,000 people. At the time, The Independent noted that “this must be the largest audience for an art movie ever recorded”.

Eisenstein’s film, made in 1925, describes the mutiny of the sailors on the battleship Potemkin in 1905, an event which then linked up with the local population in Odessa as part of Russia’s 1905 revolution. In France the authorities destroyed the film; in Germany it was subject to censorship and in Britain it was banned, apart from club performances, until 1954.

For the film’s Moscow premiere in January 1926, its soundtrack was a medley of existing pieces by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and others, but when the film reached Berlin later that year, it had its first specially-written score, by the radical composer Edmund Meisel. Eisenstein would subsequently acclaim the power of such “unity of fused musical and visual images” in his work and is said to have hoped that a new Battleship Potemkin soundtrack would be written for each new decade.

In April 2003, Philip Dodd, director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, approached Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe and suggested that they might write a new score for the film and perform it as a free concert in Trafalgar Square. They wrote the music in the order it would be heard, following the structure of the film. From the beginning they resolved to combine electronic music and strings; the lyrics of the three vocal pieces within it were largely inspired by the film’s original subtitles, though one – After All (The Odessa Staircase) – was also prompted by the role in London of Trafalgar Square as a home of political dissent.

Tennant and Lowe decided to ask Torsten Rasch to orchestrate the work after hearing his song cycle Mein Herz Brennt, a record based on the music of the rock group Rammstein which has sold over two million copies worldwide. Torsten Rasch’s orchestrations were recorded by the Dresdner Sinfoniker, conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer, in Berlin during July 2004. The finished composition – “not so much background music as foreground music”, says Neil Tennant.