This May the Hallé is celebrating Dvořák. The orchestra’s music director Sir Mark Elder has previously mounted a festival of the Czech composer’s work in Chicago, but now brings him home to Manchester. Nature, Life and Love features seven concerts in under three weeks, and will obviously feature an outing for the big symphonies, nos 7, 8 and 9, and the hugely popular cello concerto. But it’s not just about the headlines of Dvořák’s music.

Debashish Bhattacharya (b 1963) is India’s leading lap steel guitar player. Equally happy in the worlds of Indian classical and West-leaning fusion music, it’s no exaggeration to say he changed the way his instrument is regarded, at home and abroad. Born in Kolkata (AKA Calcutta) to parents who were both classical singers in the gwailor tradition, he embraced both sitar and western guitar as a young child, then spent most of his twenties studying with Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra, a master of raga slide guitar.

Beth Orton (b 1970) is a singer-songwriter who first came to prominence via her collaborations with the Chemical Brothers, at the start of both their careers. She recorded an album with the producer William Orbit in 1993 but it was her 1995 album, Trailer Park, a canny amalgamation of folk and electronica, that really put her on the map as a solo artist. Since then, spending increasing amounts of time in the US, she has recorded a series of critically acclaimed albums, the latest of which, Kidsticks, her seventh, appears in May.

Visceral and vividly colouristic, Clare Woods' paintings are at once abstract and figurative, perpetuating traditional genres but simultaneously occupying a less easily defined area of artistic practice. She puts innocuous or ambiguous subject matter into tension with titles and forms that suggest dark undertones, while big, universal themes are treated with the immediacy of personal experience. Her work is notable for its luscious paintwork and yet she is not a painterly painter, her initial training as a sculptor continuing to inform and shape her work.

It was in August 1968 that Graham Nash, then still a member of The Hollies, took a cab from LAX airport in Los Angeles to Joni Mitchell's house in Laurel Canyon. He was just embarking on a love affair with Joni, but also about to blast off on a different kind of adventure with the two musicians who greeted him at her house, David Crosby and Stephen Stills.

Alexei Sayle (b 1952) first came to fame at the birth of alternative comedy, as MC at the Comedy Store in London at the dawn of the 1980s. He cemented his reputation via his recurring role in the anarchic student sitcom classic The Young Ones, as well as appearances in a number of Comic Strip Presents… films. He has written and fronted a host of sketch shows, including the Emmy Award-winning Alexei Sayle’s Stuff.

Charles Linehan is an acclaimed British choreographer, whose company has performed all over the world, from DanSpace New York to Brussels’ Kaai Theatre to the Venice Biennale. Born in Cyprus and raised in Kent, he studied at the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance, prior to honing his craft as a dancer with various European companies.

Errollyn Wallen is celebrated both as a singer-songwriter and for her rigorous and communicative contemporary new music. Her works include 13 operas and a plethora of orchestral, choral, chamber works, solo and ensemble piano music and concertos, as well as award-winning music for film and TV; her Principia and Spirit in Motion were featured in the London Paralympics opening ceremony in 2012.

"Just listen". That's an imperative, of course, but it can be a very fair and reasonable one if the tone is right. It was Claudio Abbado's encouragement to his Lucerne Festival Orchestra players to make chamber music writ large. It also sounds persuasive and not at all militant coming from the mouths of ENO chorus members as their plea to the dramatic changes proposed by Chief Executive Officer Cressida Pollock, appointed a year ago.

Youth, AKA Martin Glover (b 1960), is a renowned music producer and bassist in the post-punk band Killing Joke. He achieved his first success with the latter in the late Seventies and has often been at the forefront of innovation and development in British music since. Having played a key role in developing their uniquely dubby, dark sound, Youth parted ways with Killing Joke in 1982 and formed Brilliant, a band that espoused an ahead-of-its-time dance musical ethos and included the involvement of both future members of the KLF.