Mr Dausgaard’s recent performances with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra have been hailed as “brutally intense”, making a “fantastic noise”. Mr Dausgaard was performing the UK premiere of fellow Dane Rued Langaard’s Symphony No. 6 The Heaven Rending in Glasgow’s City Halls.
Ken Walton of The Scotsman references Dausgaard’s typical physical enthusiasm, writing of the exciting performance:
“The moods are volatile and extreme, and the piece’s stylistic identity is largely governed by icy modal deference to Nielsen, all of which clearly struck a chord with Dausgaard. His physical enthusiasm translated into an aptly feverish and brutally intense performance; the best, in fact, of an otherwise tempered evening of Romantic excess.”
Similar praise was written by Richard Bratby of The Spectator who writes:
“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.”