Thomas Dausgaard's Prom with the BBC Symphony Orchestra opened with the first UK performances of two works from his native Denmark: Rued Langgaard's Symphony No 11, Ixion (1945), and Incontri (2010) by Pelle Gudmunsen-Holmgreen, the latter replacing an originally scheduled piece by Benedict Mason.
Langgaard was one of music's depressive mavericks, and Ixion – taking its name from the mythological figure who was bound for eternity on a burning wheel – is a brief vision of hell, viewed as a condition of mind-numbing futility. A banal, gaudily scored melody is subject to endless chromatic key changes and repetitions, against which four belting tubas sustain protracted dissonances. Langgaard cannily brings it all to a halt precisely at the point when you think you're going insane with it yourself.
Gudmunsen-Holmgreen calls Incontri "jungle baroque", and it is essentially a concerto grosso, in which a series of arguments and dialogues between woodwind ululations, brass fanfares and a big string chorale are held together by steady, ritualistic percussion throbs. It's attractively scored and was slickly played.
The bulk of the programme, however, was given over to Russian classics. Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto was finely controlled and shaped by Dausgaard, while his soloist Daniel Müller-Schott, virtuoso yet curiously modest, probed the sardonic wit of its outer movements and the soured romanticism of its central moderato with great and detailed insight.
Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, meanwhile, was less considered and altogether more erratic. An unusually restrained account of the first movement's exposition was followed by a development section of considerable wildness. Dausgaard ratcheted the emotional pitch of the march up to the level of hysteria, but didn't quite sustain the anguish into the finale, which was elegiac rather than tragic in mood.
•If you're at any Prom this summer, tweet your thoughts about it to @guardianmusic using the hashtag #proms, and we'll pull what you've got to say into one of our weekly roundups – or leave your comments below
