MANCHESTER staged a landmark Festival of Expressionism almost two decades ago, fusing the theatre, music, and visual arts of one of the most fertile and challenging periods of early last century. That was a courageous and underfunded one-off. Nowadays, the Manchester International Festival (MIF) has emerged as one of the main events in the city's arts calendar.

It has capitalised on venues with a religious past. St Peter's, a decommissioned church in east Manchester, hosted Kenneth Branagh's mud-immersed Macbeth. The Albert Hall on Peter Street, an Edwardian-Georgian Wesleyan chapel, and, at times, stand-in concert hall, took over for the American director Peter Sellars's strikingly understated staging of Michelangelo's sonnets, sung bewitchingly in Russian by the bass-baritone Eric Owens, and with, instead of piano, the lithest of organ accompaniments from Cameron Carpenter.

As portrayals of soul-searching, both Branagh's dithering Macbeth and Owens's introspective exhaustion could scarcely be bettered. Indeed, Owens's broadly paced, warm-toned self-analysis, with Carpenter's cautious three-manual registrations - often soft diapasons or woody flutes sufficed, and, when the brass let rip, its imperiousness caught you by surprise - had the edge on the kilted Scot's frenetic flurries of doubt.

Shostakovich often sounds like Bach. It was not just the pairing with a Bach Solo Cantata (no. 56: "I will gladly carry Christ's Cross") which injected Bach into this dramatic evocation: he was already there in Shostakovich's Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarotti.

John Tavener, a composer whom I associate with many special places, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and other, made do with an auditorium in the canal quarter of Manchester: the Bridgewater Hall has become the flagship for both the Hallé Orchestra and (here) the BBC Philharmonic.

There were several Tavener premières on hand, including If Ye Love Me, a touching work for the MIF's Sacred Sounds Choir, a multifaith group who responded warmly to the uplifting cantor role of the Sufi specialist singer Abida Parveen. Her delivery inspired them to override occasional dicey intonation and rise to a magnificent performance.

A love duet between Krishna and the girl chief Radha, repeating exiguous texts, allowed the upper voices of the soprano Elin Manahan Thomas and the tenor John Mark Ainsley to interchange in sequences of astonishing beauty. His voice latterly broke upwards into falsetto; hers rose into the stratosphere. The BBC brass exploded with astounding emotional impact.

Later, the intense self-examination of Owens was anticipated in an agonised new Tavener monologue, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, based on a Tolstoy story, in which the bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu confirmed that Tavener, when he wants, can work wonders in an operatic, or quasi-dramatic, vein.

Tavener has more than once suffered life-threatening illness. Those personal associations render this slow perishing, battered by the medics ("For three whole days he floundered inside a black sack, shared by invisible forces") all the more poignant.

Yet nothing quite compared with a revival of Tavener's amazing syncretic work In Alium, a survival from the 1968 Proms, which stands up with the best of Modernism today. There is an underlay of Messiaen here, and, beneath that, a feeling of amplified Beethoven; but the work holds its own wondrously, with its interplay of French poetry (Charles Péguy, full of Christmas optimism, faith, and charity - Manahan Thomas again superb) and a concluding variant of Tallis's great proclamation Spem in alium.

Mahámátar, a two-word invocation (nominally Sanskrit, actually in Greek) to the Great Mother, draws inspiration from Werner Herzog's film Pilgrimage, about world pilgrimages (to Zagorsk, to the Virgin of Guadeloupe, and so on), but seemed too muddled, while much of the film imagery, shown simultaneously, was too weakly selected to make the same impact as the other works.

Yet the outstanding figure here (as in the Tolstoy) was the cellist Steven Isserlis, who can be relied on to bring out the profundity, earnestness, and passion of works by Tavener. The whole amounted to a fine tribute to a deeply searching composer. The BBC Philharmonic, wonderful trombonists not least, ensured, as ever, that this composer monograph had the stature it deserved.