Nielsen’s early symphonies aren’t just well-kept secrets; they are essential listening for anyone serious about understanding the composer’s place in 20th-century music.

Symphony No 1 raises eyebrows in musicological circles by dint of its ‘progressive tonality’ – the first work of its kind not to play by the rules on its tonal journey. But the whoops and cheers you hear at the end of this live performance from Seattle aren’t rooted in musicological analysis. They are startled, delighted reactions to the sense of energy, rupture and chaos that punch out of the music – that would infiltrate the composer’s better-known later symphonies but are even more striking here for their almost Mendelssohnian context.

‘Like a child playing with dynamite’, concluded the critic Charles Kjerulf after the symphony’s first performance in 1894 – a compliment, make no mistake. Kjerulf recognised the long-term significance of the symphony’s disruptive organised recklessness, of a new hard-edged Nordic modernism ready to blow the lied-born Germanic style that dominated Scandinavian music out of the water. Nielsen himself wrote to his wife as he prepared to conduct the piece in Dresden: ‘I feel certain that such a piece as this will …open everyone’s ears and eyes to all the gravy and grease you hear in the imitators of Wagner.’

Its successor is the one work in Nielsen’s cycle that steps out of line – which can’t, arguably, be included in a straight trajectory drawn from the First to the Sixth. Its inspiration was an isolated object: a painting spotted in a coaching inn depicting the ancient Greek notion of the ‘Four Temperaments’ – the idea that human emotions can be grouped into four states or humours. Nielsen and his companions were tickled pink in particular by its depiction of the ‘choleric’ man on horseback, whose ‘eyes were bulging out of his head, his face distorted with rage’, according to the composer, who himself ‘could not help but burst out laughing’ – a note to performers if ever there was one.

Themes are more clear-cut in this piece but Nielsen’s affront to German ‘gravy and grease’ is there in the tornado that tears the symphony open – the first four all open with such disorientating, chaotic gestures – and in the invading forces and unsettling niggles that stalk the central argument. A decade after the First, this symphony still felt like the work of a renegade, another critic deeming that the symphony’s colours were ‘very brutal and in their crudeness easily cross the aesthetic line’.

Playing it safe in Nielsen’s music is an interpretative non-starter but that doesn’t preclude care and preparation. Here, the breathlessness that slightly undermined the first instalment in Thomas Dausgaard’s Seattle Nielsen cycle (Symphonies Nos 3 and 4 – 8/18) is traded for sheer speed. The results are startling. Tempos are so often irrelevant in the context of overall footing, phrasing and balance but here Dausgaard’s are up to 20 per cent faster than those chosen by Oramo in Stockholm and Gilbert in New York.

Speed requires confidence, and you can feel the Seattle Symphony’s building with this further exploration of what remains an alien aesthetic to so many orchestras. More to the point, Nielsen’s first two symphonies can take it: No 1 with its short, jabbing, insistent phrases and sense of unease founded on the banana skin of an opening chord in the wrong key; No 2 so easily weighed down by overly literal interpretations of its four temperamental states that forget Nielsen’s ear for caricature. Dausgaard doesn’t. His performance of The Four Temperaments is the real winner here.

Still, he is not averse to intervention. His choreography at the pivotal developmental passage from 4'40" in the First Symphony’s opening Allegro feels stage-managed; his acceleration (unmarked) through the Second Symphony’s final bars is unnecessary and borders on the crass. But so much of what he does elsewhere is fortifying and works with the music’s vibrant, life-affirming central conceits – the Dadaist moments and ominous signals in No 2, the big-boned counterpoint in the finale of No 1, which surges here like few other performances. Slow movements do far more than lie on their backs in flat Danish fields; the First Symphony’s Andante bulges and simmers with passion – a new perspective of the speed, but created with other tools besides.

Nielsen’s Second is better suited to the fat, boomy sound picture, and the thrusting Seattle playing (and rollicking brass) to the music’s sheer bravado. The swagger in the performance matches the music, especially when the entire ensemble appears to lift its feet up at 7'30" in the ‘choleric’ Allegro (a performance to put you in mind of Morton Gould’s with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra – RCA, 6/67). Nielsen’s First usually works best with a clearer, more translucent and ‘classical’ sound picture but here Dausgaard’s constant underlining of the music’s obviousness gets him off the hook. Fresh, fascinating but not uncontroversial accounts, which is just what this neglected early Nielsen needs.