Recent cultural highlights

A powerful musical meditation with Tyshawn Sorey, punks on the Golden Hinde and Marilyn Monroe at the National Portrait Gallery

(Foreground L-R: Ruth Gibson, Tyshawn Sorey and Davóne Tines in front of members of the BBC Singers at St Giles’ Cripplegate, London, 22 June 2026. Photo: John Earls)

A powerful musical meditation

There are some pieces of music you don’t expect to see performed that often. So, it was with great excitement that I went to see Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) at St Giles’ Cripplegate church in London’s Barbican.

The fact that the piece was being conducted by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer himself only added to the sense of occasion. Sorey is also a talented multi-instrumentalist, not least on drums, which was how I first saw him playing live with Vijay Iyer’s Trio in 2017.

Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) was commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the non-denominational Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, which contains 14 ‘black’ paintings by Mark Rothko. It had its world premiere at the chapel in 2022 and Sorey drew inspiration for the piece not only from Rothko’s paintings but Morton Feldman's own meditative musical work Rothko Chapel, which itself premiered there in 1972.

Sorey’s 75 minute piece uses the same instrumentation as Feldman’s (viola, percussion, celesta, choir) with the addition of piano and the replacement of solo soprano with bass-baritone. It’s an evolving, contemplative work which is never less than absorbing. All of the performers here were outstanding: Davóne Tines (bass-baritone) compelling as he articulated fragments from Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, Ruth Gibson beautiful and expressive on viola, GBSR Duo (George Barton on percussion and Siwan Rhys on piano and celesta) perfectly provided the right amount of tension as well as chinks of light, and the BBC Singers yet again showed why they are such a formidable choir not least in their range of repertoire.

It’s a remarkable piece of music that was made all the more special in this performance in this venue.

• An album of Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) performed by Davóne Tines (bass-baritone), Kim Kashkashian (viola), Sarah Rothenberg (piano/celesta), Steven Schick (percussion), and the Houston Chamber Choir, conducted by Sorey was released by DACAMERA Editions in January 2026.

Punks Ahoy!

I had a very enjoyable evening seeing two separate solo acoustic sets from Pauline Murray and Helen McCookerybook on board the Golden Hinde (or the full-size reconstruction of Sir Francis Drake’s Elizabethan galleon moored in Southwark) of all places.

Both are true punk pioneers, Murray with Penetration and McCookerybook with Joby and the Hooligans. But both also developed since those late 1970s days - Murray releasing albums including with the Invisible Girls and as a solo artist, as well as publishing an acclaimed autobiography, and McCookerybook with The Chefs, Helen and the Horns and solo - she also published as Helen Reddington, The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era. (Helen is also a talented artist and I mention the wonderful drawings she does and posts on social media in my March 2026 cultural highlights here.)

As I sat amongst the woodwork of this ‘national historic ship’, I wondered “who would have thought some 50 years since the start of punk that we’d be here doing this?”. But there was no question that the punk sensibility carries on. It just looks and sounds different. As it should.

(L-R Pauline Murray and Helen McCookerybook perform on board the Golden Hinde, June 2026. Photos: John Earls)

• Pauline Murray’s autobiography Life’s a Gamble (2023) is published by Omnibus Press.

• Helen McCookerybook’s album Showtunes from the Shadows (2025) is released on Tiny Global

A spellbinding ballet double bill

I was spellbound by So Are We, the Sol León and Paul Lightfoot double-bill at the Royal Ballet for whom this was their first time choreographing. The opening Shoot the Moon (created for Nederlands Dans Theater in 2006) which tracks two couples and a third male dancer through a revolving three-room set is captivating as is, albeit in a different way, the longer multi-scene Salle de danse with its cast of 45 including the pairing of Francesca Hayward and Marcelino Sambé. I was very happy.

(Lukas B. Brændsrød in rehearsal for León and Lightfoot’s Shoot the Moon. Photo: Johan Persson)

The return of the Durutti Column (again)

The Durutti Column, featuring the unique guitar sound of Vini Reilly, have announced the release of their first studio album for 16 years in July. Called Renascent, it also features stalwart Durutti Column percussionist Bruce Mitchell and producer/multi-instrumentalist Keir Stewart, as well as a number of guest vocalists.

In advance of the album, the single Liars has been released. It is characteristically warm and tender including Vini’s delicate voice and closing refrain of “I am sorry, I love you”.

Marilyn at NPG

I very much enjoyed, and was not a little moved by, the Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. It is superbly curated largely around the photographers whose pictures make up the bulk of the works on display. There are also paintings where Marilyn is the subject including three by Pauline Boty. Caroline Collett has written an excellent review on her Substack here.

(Marilyn Monroe, ‘Ballerina’ sitting, 1954, by Milton H. Greene)

• Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait is at the National Portrait Gallery until 6 September 2026

(N.B. I thought the display in the entrance foyer of an easel with a photographic portrait of the great artist David Hockney with some portraits of his own in the background was a nice touch following his recent death.)

And finally…

There have been many tributes and reminiscences to David Hockney (his Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris exhibition featured in my November 2025 cultural highlights here). My favourite used to be the story about Hockney saying after a meeting with the famously wrinkly-faced poet W. H. Auden, "If that's his face, what must his scrotum look like?" (although it seems it was actually the artist Jim Dine who said a variation of it to Hockney after the pair of them had been drawing Auden’s portrait). A version of this story is told by Andrew Marr in a very enjoyable ‘David Hockney special’ edition of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row here.

(W. H. Auden)