From students to shouters, the library offers a space like no other

Many of us can’t get through a workout without tunes or telly to make it less boring. And there’s nothing wrong with that, says Simon Usborne

His musical tastes famously extend from Abba to Wings, “the band The Beatles could have been”. But Alan Partridge’s elevation to the big screen is set to bring a new lease of life to a host of artists unfairly excluded from pop’s hall of fame.

One of the triumphs of this year’s Manchester International Festival was its capacity to create a sense of place in an unexpected space. The 5,000 who communed on the Tarmac of a city centre car park to see a relay of Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford’s Macbeth on Saturday night can vouch for that.

Mogwai are riding high on their spooky music for TV hit ‘The Returned'

"Daora" (meaning "dope", as in "cool") is a follow-up to the best Brazilian compilation of 2010; Oi! A Nova Musica Brasileira! And cool it is, in the way it avoids generic samba and bossa nova in favour of cutting-edge yet melodic hip-hop more sonically engaging than anything at present coming from the US or UK.

Sven Helbig is a young German composer equally drawn to classical, pop and hip-hop modes, probably most famous for his orchestrations on Pet Shop Boys' Battleship Potemkin and The Most Incredible Thing. That populist spirit informs this debut release, with emotionally expansive pieces restricted to pop-song length.

Chosen as the soundtrack for the exhibition ECM – A Cultural Archeology at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the music on these six CDs is austere even by the label’s own standards, but no less beautiful.

Paul Higgins's staging of Madama Butterfly is not easy to watch, and nor should it be.

'I loved the sunsets in Ibiza so much, I filmed my latest video there'

Excavating buried pasts to soothe unhappy souls

About half way into Barbra Streisand Live, the star, sparkling in her spangly tuxedo, launched into a 10-minute "Ask Barbra" session. It is six years since she last played in London, and fans had been given the chance to fill in a card, on arrival, with a question for their heroine. One got the sense that these had been judiciously edited. "Barbra, how are you so beautiful?" enquired one. Barbra refused to reveal her magic formula, and displayed no false modesty, tipping the card back into the box from whence it came. This was not an evening for non-believers.

TV pick of the week: The Returned

Bands often talk about breaking the expected boundaries of the rock concert. Usually, this means that a) the lead singer jumps off the stage and walks through the crowd, or b) really expensive pyro. So when a band really does snap you out of that rock-show routine, it’s a grin-inducing luxury.