“Like watching a child play with dynamite” wrote one critic, after the 1893 premiere of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No 1. Perhaps he hadn’t paused to consider whether the image that conjured might be wholly positive; but this performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra made it easy to understand the compulsion to describe the work in that way. Sakari Oramo is conducting the orchestra in all six of the Danish composer’s symphonies between now and next May, and the series got off to an exhilarating start with this bold and, yes, explosive work.

There was nothing apologetic about the performance: this was music written by a young, hotheaded, but rightly confident composer, and Oramo and his orchestra captured the work’s freshness and momentum from the start. In the third movement, the orchestra maintained a lightness of step in the face of some passages of rhythmic repetition that teeter on the edge of obsessiveness. And the finale was gripping for its tension between light and shade, between major and minor keys; in the closing moments the music shows one face and then another like a coin flipped in the air, finally landing happy side up.

Each of the Nielsen symphonies is to be heard alongside works written contemporaneously; here the companion piece was Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 6. It was, on the face of it, an odd choice of opener – usually, nothing closes a concert with quite such finality. But it made for an intriguing juxtaposition: the sound of the end of an era, versus Nielsen’s new beginnings. In this expansive, yet crisply controlled performance, Oramo had the orchestra sounding glorious.

Mozart’s D Major Violin Concerto somehow slotted between the two, and while it seemed in some ways superfluous, it was good to hear Augustin Hadelich, who was a fluent, vibrant-toned soloist in the Concerto and a laid-back virtuoso in his encore, Paganini’s Caprice No 9.

• The Nielsen cycle continues until May 2015. Box office: 020-7638 8891. Venue: Barbican, London.