Ronald Stevenson, who died on Saturday at the age of 87, was a composer and pianist who will be much missed both in the small Borders village where he lived and by the much larger musical community in Scotland and beyond. As a composer he was unashamedly rooted in the late 19^th Century tradition of intellectual pianism – in his music you can trace a line of descent from Bach to Liszt through his great hero Busoni.

Michael Tilson Thomas is in town to celebrate his 70^th birthday. And he's with old friends – he’s been working with the London Symphony since 1970, including six years as principal conductor. There is still plenty of chemistry here, and the orchestra’s strengths perfectly complement his, the clarity and boldness of his interpretations given voice in the orchestra’s precise ensemble and rich sonorities. The concert was a gala event with a retrospective feel, and each piece was well chosen to highlight an aspect of the long and fruitful relationship.

While there is, of course, safety in numbers, but five premieres on four continents is, perhaps, a little novel. Tan Dun’s new Concerto for Double-Bass, subtitled Wolf Totem, is a co-commission by five orchestras: the Royal Concertgebouw, St Louis Symphony, the Taiwan Philharmonic, the Tasmanian Symphony and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.The principal bass player in each orchestra is to be soloist and the piece received its world première last month in Amsterdam.

A memorial concert to a busy man. Alexander Ivashkin, who died last January, was a cellist, a scholar, a teacher, an authority on Russian music, and much else besides. This evening’s concert faced up to the daunting challenge of commemorating the many diverse aspects of Ivashkin’s career. The results were predictably wide-ranging, yet always coherent, and an impressive focus was brought to this mixed but never eclectic programme.

When you’re visiting someone for the first time, it’s probably just as well that you make a good impression – or else you may not be asked back. If that’s what the Carducci String Quartet was trying to do on their début visit to Liverpool, then they did all the right things.  They mesmerised the audience with their performance of the second of Beethoven’s "Razumovsky" quartets, so much so that they were forced to sit down and perform an encore, which turned out to be a little irreverent Shostakovich, in the shape of the Rondo Polka.

This recital had looked so good on paper. The charismatic Dutch violinist Janine Jansen, with Itamar Golan at the piano, would bring all the brooding darkness of late '60s Shostakovich to life, and would then charm and finally dazzle in Ravel. In the hall on the night, and in particular in the second half, she didn't quite live up to such expectations.

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.

Sir Mark Elder has a penchant for taking on large-scale works in Manchester, from operatic concert performances of Wagner and Verdi to Hollywood musicals. Following that line, he kicked off the new Hallé season with Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé ballet score in its entirety, described by the composer as “a vast musical fresco faithful to the Greece of my dreams”. We are used to hearing the odd suite, but rarely the whole work.