Pop duo the Pet Shop Boys have unveiled their latest work, a tribute to wartime codebreaker Alan Turing, at the first of this year’s Late Night Proms.

The 50-minute performance, described as a “musical biography”, was narrated by Juliet Stevenson and featured an excerpt from Gordon Brown’s public 2009 apology for Turing’s 1952 conviction for homosexual activity. The work, entitled A Man from the Future, received a standing ovation at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

Chrissie Hynde also performed alongside both Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, giving renditions of three slightly lesser-known Pet Shop Boys songs with the BBC Concert Orchestra, before joining Tennant in a version of the band’s 1987 hit ‘Rent’.

Alan Turing and his Bletchley Park colleagues worked during World War Two to help accelerate Allied efforts to read German naval messages enciphered with the Enigma machine. Turing went on to kill himself in 1954, two years after being prosecuted for gross indecency. Last year he received a posthumous royal pardon.

“Turing was way ahead of his time in the realms of both technology and sexuality,” said Tennant and Lowe ahead of Wednesday’s concert, which can be heard via the BBC iPlayer. Continuing, Tennant stated that “His open expression of his homosexuality was astonishingly brave and forward-looking at a time when gay men were relentlessly persecuted by the government.”