Live Review: The Heritage Orchestra Presents: Blade Runner

The Heritage Orchestra is the brainchild of British artist Chris Wheeler, who together with a mate came up with the idea of an experimental classical pop orchestra during a UK club night back in 2004. Since then the young group have collaborated with such luminaries as Jamie Callum, Tim Minchin, UNKLE and Massive Attack, and have carved a very specific niche as the go-to collective for large scale orchestral projects for artists and musicians looking to explore bigger ideas.

In 2008 Massive Attack curated London's Meltdown Festival and commissioned them to perform an orchestral version of Vangelis' iconic dystopian score to Blade Runner. What Wheeler's interpretation excelled at was fully fleshing out the original ideas and motifs that Vangelis created rather than just mimic them, and what it did better than Vangelis' score was combining the organic aesthetics of live instrumentation with the artifice of electronic noise. This synthesis mirrors perfectly Blade Runner's central philosophical concerns, and all of the awe and sweeping melancholy the film inspires was fully realised in the performance.

The first thing that struck us was the huge difference in texture. The original opening piece that accompanies a wide shot of a vast glittering world of industry and fire is majestic, but clearly artificial. Here, velvet swelling strings were punctuated by rolling timpani, while a harp competed with the nattering of analogue electronic objects clicking and pinging in the foreground. On queue the heroic synth phrase burst into life and soared out over the crowd. There was no way this particular sound could have been replaced without losing the effect, and it was key to maintaining tonal fidelity. It came back during the triumphant closing credits theme.

Accompanying the music was a nice lighting setup that played with colour and shape depending on context or mood. Spotlights were shone through grates and slats, emphasising the film's noir elements. The images on screen were impressionistic, blurry shots of traffic at night through rain superimposed over each other to create density and a feeling of it flowing in all directions (even above street level). The highlight of the night was Dr Tyrell's Death, in which Roy Batty executes his “father” for not granting him more life. The piece is a powerful two-chord death march, accompanied by an image of an owl flying in slow motion towards the audience, captured in slowly shattering glass bathed in red light.

This was a fascinating achievement that allowed us to explore a familiar score with new perspective, and nuances that may have slipped past us previously were stunningly recreated in amazing high definition.