Rued awakening

It’s always promising when the orchestra won’t fit on the stage. For the UK première, some 97 years after it was written, of the Danish composer Rued Langgaard’s Sixth Symphony (The Heaven-Rending), the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra filled every available inch of platform space, with four additional trumpeters perched in the choir seats. Everything was set for what the conductor Thomas Dausgaard described, pre-concert, as a ‘cosmic struggle between good and evil’. And god knows, it certainly made a fantastic noise. In a venue as compact as Glasgow City Halls, the onslaught of two sets of timpani had an almost physical impact. You felt the air wobble. Dausgaard had clearly thought closely about this single-movement symphony; building the tension, pacing the climaxes, inflecting pastoral string melodies with a questioning lilt.

And? Well, it sounded a lot like Carl Nielsen, a little like Richard Strauss, and very slightly like the wackier sort of Holst.