The transfer this week to the West End of The Weir has reminded theatre-goers of Conor McPherson’s hypnotic powers as a dramatist. In the Donmar's revival of the play you can palpably feel the playwright’s storytelling magic casting its spell all over again as, on a windy evening in a rural Irish pub, character after character unburdens himself - and finally herself - of a supernatural tale.

Claudio Abbado became the Principal Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1989 and continued his association with the world's most illustrious orchestra until very recently. Two members of the Berlin Phil's famous horn section share their memories of playing under the modest maestro.

“It is at the end that a composer can achieve his finest effects,“ declared Richard Strauss. He was thinking of his great operatic and symphonic epilogues, but apply that to the art of conducting, adjust the “at” to “towards”, and it applies supremely well to Claudio Abbado, who has died at the age of 80.

There are no awards, nor nominations. On the plus side there are no publicity chores either. And there is none of that contractual argy-bargy about billing. In this week’s Listed, there is no billing for the stars who show up on screen without prior warning. And it’s only the biggest stars can do this sort of thing: materialise in the narrative and give it a powerful shot in the arm. If properly deployed, the impact of uncredited cameo can be huge.

Cher was the multi-platform performer of her day, a singer, TV personality, cabaret artist, and Oscar-winning actress. She came up as the initially teenage half of pop duo Sonny & Cher (pictured below left) in the mid-Sixties with her partner (and later husband) Sonny Bono, hitting the charts with megahit "I Got You, Babe". The pair went on to helm a successful TV show in the early Seventies but when they split up Cher was given her own self-titled variety show in 1975.

With the passing of Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers yesterday, aged 74, rock’n’roll loses half of one of its greatest original pairings. With his brother Don he meshed the close harmonies of country acts such as the Louvin Brothers with the poppy rock’n’roll of fellow southern boy Buddy Holly, a close friend with whom they toured regularly.

With the end of 2013 nearly upon us it's time for a last look back before we step forward into the unknown. Yesterday our rundown of the year's finest films took you from a radiant romance to a bristling biopic, but the nature of such lists means that the best is yet to come and those that remain could hardly be more different. And so - our final five.

5 Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino)

The fledgling career of Michael Codron, who has been knighted in the New Year's Honours list at the age of 75, might have ended almost as soon as it began. He embarked on a career as a solo impresario in 1956 and had staged three shows, none of which prospered. Then he went to Cambridge and saw a promising undergraduate revue, written by Bamber Gascoigne. He decided to bring the improbably titled Share My Lettuce to London, recasting it with Kenneth Williams and the then unknown Maggie Smith.

2013 was the year that Thom Yorke, somewhat tautologically, referred to the music business as “a dying corpse”, and Justin Bieber's manager Scooter Braun claimed that same business “doesn't exist any more.” This was slightly odd, given that it was one of the liveliest years in recent memory, with mainstream and underground pulsating with debate over big issues and big releases, and – for all the technological and multimedia proliferation which prompted Yorke and Braun's hyperbole – the actual music itself being higher on the cultural agenda than for a long time.

Not a year in which big names came through, and many on the list below are actually quite introverted and low-key, but none the worse for that. Among numerous global musical gems this year were the following: