R Stevie Moore: Personal Appeal

Johnny Marr’s second single as a solo artist, New Town Velocity, describes his youthful propulsion by pop music in grey late Seventies Manchester towards a bright, boundless future he duly reached with The Smiths. It surely also describes the renewed energy he’s drawn from being back in his home city after five years in Portland, Oregon. Manchester certainly inspired this year’s debut solo album The Messenger, with its resourcefully melodic rock rooted in local inspirations such as Magazine and his own past with The Smiths, so often disavowed till now.

“It’s a shame God is dead” sings Jamie Lee on “So Long”, the opening track of his band Money’s debut album The Shadow of Heaven. With a melody rooted in gospel and a musical backdrop ecstatically imbued with the grace of the devotional rather than the level-headedness of the non-spiritual, it’s hard not to wonder whose God he’s singing of. The Shadow of Heaven feels reverential – the band have played in churches – but it’s an adoration fashioned on their own terms.

When I used to work for the much-missed Face magazine, there was a phrase regularly used, only half in jest: “three things is a trend”. Which means that, unlikely though it might sound, hip hop marching bands are now a trend in leftfield club music.

You know it must be the holiday season when comic caper-loving Told by an Idiot run riot in the Royal Exchange. Expect the theatre of the absurd, with glimpses of Keystone Kops and Marx Brothers-style zaniness. This time, director Paul Hunter has delved into 19th-century Russia and come up with Alexandr Ostrovsky’s self-styled “savagely funny comedy” Too Clever By Half, in the late Rodney Ackland’s adaptation.

It isn’t so much man versus machine as man versus the man behind the machine. Famously, in 1997 the Russian chess grandmaster and world champion Garry Kasparov faced IBM's supercomputer RS/600SP, known as Deep Blue, in New York City. But behind the faceless machine was another genius, its Taiwan-born architect Dr Fen Hsiung Hsu. Both had much at stake – and not just a game of chess. Kasparov sought undisputed supremacy in the face of an opponent programmed – and reprogrammed between games – by a team of scientists and chess experts. Hsu sought to fulfil a computer scientist’s dream.

It is nearly 50 years since Martha Argerich played in Manchester. She performed with the Hallé Orchestra and the conductor was Claudio Abbado, making his UK debut. That was in 1965 and a year later they repeated their double act. Thanks to the Manchester International Festival and her special working relationship with conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy, music director of the Manchester Camerata, she bridged that gap last night.

The Machine by Matt Charman is about the famous chess match between the then world champion Garry Kasparov and the chess computer, Deep Blue, which took place in New York City in 1997. The match captured the imagination of the general public at the time as perhaps no other chess match has before or since. Kasparov's face was hanging in Times Square and the New York Stock Exchange had the match on its screens.

It was wonderful watching and listening to Abida Parveen through the sculptural arms of a girl sitting a few rows in front. As Abida began, with a rich, clarinet-like voice, the woman raised her arms as if to bathe in or caress the sound, elegantly turning and twisting her fingers and hands to the music.

It was an inspired Manchester International Festival initiative to devote a concert to the work of Sir John Tavener as he approaches his 70th birthday. Not only that, but the programme featured three world premieres, including a choral piece specially commissioned for the MIF Sacred Voices, made up of 70 women from all faiths and none. Leading it all with the BBC Philharmonic was conductor Tecwyn Evans.