Not many 17-year-olds could pen a coherent hour-long symphony (even Jay Greenberg might struggle), still less see it triumphantly premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra three years later, yet Rued Langgaard did with his five-movement First (1910). Fluently orchestrated, its style is full-bloodedly late-Romantic with Wagner and Tchaikovsky vying for supremacy on a Brucknerian (or late-Schubertian) timescale. The illustrative nature of these “Mountain Pastorals” provides an additional, expressive, unifying factor, whether of the opening “Surf and Sunlight” or the energetic “Mountain Ascent”.

The huge outer movements account for two thirds of the work’s length. Dausgaard favours an expansive approach. I prefer Stupel’s tauter tempi which give much-needed urgency to some of Langgaard’s more flaccid structures. In the central movements Dausgaard’s tendency to linger (though he is significantly swifter in the fourth span, “Mountain Ascent”) is more of an advantage. So, too, is Dacapo’s spectacular recording; but overall Stupel remains, with still serviceably good sound, the benchmark version.

While Langgaard’s music has become better known, that of Knudåge Riisager still languishes largely unheard. His 45-minute ballet Benzin (“Petrol”, 1928) was created in collaboration with cartoonist Storm Petersen, telling the story of a farmhand who does a stranded motorcyclist a good turn by fetching some petrol, returning to find the biker attempting to court his sweetheart. All’s well that ends well and the nocturnal finale features a dance of petrol fumes through the dormant village! The ballet’s satirical and Futurist elements did not find favour in pre-war Denmark and duly bombed, through the music’s easy style (think of Les Six meets Carl Davis by way of the “Humoresk” of Nielsen’s Sixth Symphony) and sparkling orchestration might have given a suite of extracts currency had Riisager bothered to make one.

Its companion pieces are both very different propositions. To Apollo, God of Light (1972) is an inventive symphonic poem depicting the sun god in Olympian (and invigoratingly dissonant) glory. Archaeopteryx (1949) – the inspiration for which is described on the title page as “magnificently ugly” – is positively bizarre, a vivid, harmonically static, fossil-in-sound of a tone-poem. All the music is played with élan by the DNSO under Hughes, showing both delicacy in Benzin and power in To Apollo and Archaeopteryx.