Pet Shop Boys/Battleship Potemkin, Barbican, London

The last time the Pet Shop Boys played their orchestral soundtrack to Sergei Eisenstein’s silent film Battleship Potemkin in London was at a spectacular free event in Trafalgar Square in 2004. The odd pairing between the detached, ironical disco duo and the didactic masterpiece of Soviet cinema proved a triumph.

The Barbican Centre, where Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe reprised the soundtrack with the BBC Concert Orchestra last Friday, was a very different setting. The acoustics were better and the seats were more comfortable. But the art-for-the-masses resonance of the previous concert was also missing. Instead, the Barbican show focused attention on the music’s formal properties as a film score.

Potemkin, made in 1925, dramatises an uprising on a naval ship during the failed Russian revolution of 1905. A virtuoso work of cinema, it combines breathtaking visual technique with crudely propagandistic politics, as epitomised by the stunning “Odessa Steps” sequence when a pram tumbles down steps as Cossack troops fire on unarmed protestors – a massacre that never took place.

True to the film’s collectivist ethos, Tennant and Lowe sat at the back of the stage behind a trademark synthesiser, almost invisible among the massed ranks of their BBC orchestra colleagues. The film, shown overhead, was a disappointingly poor print, though the power of Eisenstein’s vision shone irresistibly through the murk.

The orchestra played second fiddle in the musical mix, though this hierarchy was harmonious, unlike the collapsing social order depicted on the screen. Lowe’s synth-work, illustrating mounting tension as the ship’s revolt gathered, was nicely underscored by the orchestra’s swelling strings, which limned the roiling emotions on board.

There were misjudgments, such as a scene where the people of Odessa gather at a quayside to mourn the slain leader of the sailors’ uprising. The music was drippy, almost kitsch; yet the mood on screen was one of growing violence. Otherwise, though, Tennant and Lowe were thoughtful interpreters. They didn’t try to match Eisenstein’s bravura camera-work, choosing to concentrate on mood rather than shot-by-shot elucidation, and Tennant’s dreamy singing during the Odessa Steps scene bravely unlocked its fantasy nature.