The concert season’s title may be Rachmaninoff Inside Out. But the work that dominated and got people talking in yesterday’s instalment of Vladimir Jurowski’s London Philharmonic series was by another composer entirely. “Weird, isn’t it?” said the man in the row behind. And that was only after the first movement of George Enescu’s massive Symphony No. 3, one of the most remarkable effusions by the composer and crack violinist chiefly known for his pair of Romanian Rhapsodies, popular picture postcards.

Barbara Hannigan, we all know, is game for anything. This Canadian soprano with the pearliest tones and the dramatic instincts of a Sarah Bernhardt can find beauty and meaning in almost every contemporary composer’s barbed wire. Recently she’s been cavorting on stage as Alban Berg’s Lulu; earlier this month, for a sliver of Ligeti, she paraded herself on the Barbican platform as a gum-chewing schoolgirl in a naughty micro-skirt.

To pair Rachmaninov’s brooding and little-performed The Miserly Knight with Wagner's brooding but much-performed Das Rheingold is an audacious piece of programming. The operas share an interest in the mortal power of money, and Rachmaninov’s score has a more distinctly Wagnerian colour than much of his later work. To do so in a single evening, requiring substantial cuts to the score of Rheingold, and to stage them in the Royal Festival Hall, shows boldness verging on the reckless.

James Dillon calls this major work, premered at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival last November, a “Cubist Stabat Mater”. He sets the hymn, but adds in more recent words, texts on related themes by Picasso, Kristeva and Rilke, among others. The music, too, acknowledges the passage of historical time, with subtle references to musical styles from down the centuries. If this all sounds like a recipe for Postmodern intellectualism and detachment, the results are surprisingly direct – a heartfelt and emphatic response to the image of the grieving mother.

The Simón Bolívar orchestra is the musical answer to the question “Would you like to supersize that?” A youth orchestra in bulk, if no longer in name, the ensemble has made a signature of its heft, making repertoire work on its own terms rather than adjusting itself to fit. On Thursday night, full-fat Beethoven and Wagner that threatened to overspill in the generosity of their gestures, so how would the orchestra fare with Mahler’s mighty Fifth Symphony?

Youth may have vanished from the title, and its first flush is gone from the cheeks of most of the young persons. Now they’re in their prime, a magnificent sight – and the sound, too, is that of a world-class orchestra with a voice. Which we heard at its most distinctive, deep and muscular, from the strings in the opening signals of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. So what went wrong with the music from Wagner’s Ring in their first 2015 Southbank concert’s second half?

Offshoots of the Venezuelan El Sistema’s worldwide dissemination as well as other youth and music projects continued to bloom and grow in 2014. The morning after what was the orchestral concert of the year for many who caught it, Alexandra Coghlan (see below) and myself included, players of the European Union Youth Orchestra reconvened in the Albert Hall to workshop three classics with musicians from nine British youth orchestras and London schools.

Goldilocks would not have been a good conductor. There’s a reason why there isn’t a dynamic marking between mezzo forte and mezzo piano. Mezzo on its own would be a pretty bland state of affairs, sat solidly in an inoffensive state of not-too-loud-and-not-too-soft, not swelling to a crescendo or pining away to a decrescendo, but content with a steady sonic compromise. Last night the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment gave us a decidedly mezzo Messiah, a performance that couldn’t seem to galvanise itself into any decisive emotion.

Tamara Stefanovich and Colin Currie – a dream team for Birtwistle’s The Axe Manual. Both are new music specialists with a gift for grace and dexterity, even in the most complex works. The score sets up a range of sophisticated relationships between piano and percussion, from sympathetic resonances to complex interplays of stretto and hocket. Yet none of this fazes the two players, nor ever challenges their close ensemble, seemingly telepathic in its precision.

In words and music Harrison Birtwistle isn’t always as gruff as he’s been painted. Interviewed over the summer during one of his 80^th birthday Prom concerts, the composer tossed off enough humorous remarks to suggest that a new career could almost beckon as a stand-up comedian touring the northern clubs.