Sibelius' and Nielsen's 150th anniversary year has prompted a proliferation of events to celebrate the music of the Nordic composers, from conferences to concert series. The Proms has been no exception, with an unusually high number of Nordic composers represented throughout the festival (although Glazunov, also in his 150th anniversary year, has been forgotten). British composer Gary Carpenter's Dadaville was premiered on the first night, which opened to the sounds of Nielsen's Maskarade and Sibelius's Belshazzar's Feast, while later concerts covered here presented premieres by the Swedish composers Anders Hillborg and B Tommy Andersson, the Norwegian composer Ørjan Matre, and Moscow-born (though UK-based) composer Alissa Firsova.

The first night of the Proms's typically potpourri programming placed Carpenter's Dadaville alongside works by Nielsen, Sibelius, Mozart and Walton, matching the plethora of influences that can be heard in the piece, from Stravinsky to Adès. In keeping with the atmosphere of the first and last nights of the Proms, Dadaville is tongue-in-cheek, including slightly sardonic humour in the penultimate section's brass slides, and pyrotechnics from the upper circle to accompany the final chord. Inspired by Max Ernst's 1924 sculpture of a wall in iron and cork, Dadaville was a much-needed contrast to the bombast of the second half of the programme, this unpredictable composer providing an amusingly thought-provoking start to the festival.

The new works by Hillborg and Andersson were among some of the most exciting music heard at this season's Proms. Both benefitted from astute programming: Hillborg's Beast Sampler was paired with Sibelius's Tapiola, and Andersson's Pan with excerpts from Nielsen's incidental music for Aladdin. The mesmerisingly desolate sounds of Beast Sampler appeared to evolve from the Aeolian sonorities of Tapiola's storm section, the entire orchestra seeming to respire, expanding and contracting on the breath of Hillborg's swirling woodwind section. The seagull sounds in the violins made explicit Hillborg's nature evocations, their shrill voices disappearing into a denser orchestral texture that portends the conclusion of the piece. Just as the natural world evoked by Sibelius and Grieg is often sinister, Hillborg's is a dangerous and fragmented landscape that threatens to subsume the individual.

Hillborg's work with electronic music was a clear inspiration for his scoring, and placing Beast Sampler after Tapiola allowed for the similarities in the two composers' techniques to be brought to the fore, Hillborg clearly working moments of Sibelian orchestration and harmony into his contemporary sound world. Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra executed both works with a militaristic precision; while this brought a refreshingly mechanical relentlessness to Tapiola it meant that the climax was a little underwhelming, and Beast Sampler could have benefitted from a little more mystery at times to achieve its full potential for menace.

B Tommy Andersson's well-received Pan presented a character portrait of the Greek god. It captured something of the complex, multi-dimensional depictions of Pan, the seductive as well as the chaotic aspects, Andersson citing as inspirations portrayals from Greek mythology through to the Italian painter Roberto Ferri (b. 1978). The driving dance rhythms in Nielsen's ‘Dance of the Prisoners’ complemented the violence of the opening of Pan, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, led by Thomas Søndergård, gave an exhilarating performance of both works. Andersson's close collaboration with the orchestra as Composer-in-Association was evident from the outset, and the organ blended beautifully, with David Goode's sensitive rendering of the part never overpowering the rest of the instruments. This was particularly impressive given the acoustic in the Royal Albert Hall and the sheer size of the organ, which can easily dominate (an intermittent problem in Jón Leifs's Organ Concerto, performed on the same evening as Beast Sampler). The work alternates between brutality and languid sensuousness, passages of wild bacchanalia framing sections of more delicate, intimate orchestration. A particularly memorable moment came towards the close of the piece in the cello solo (played by Rebecca Gilliver), signalling the return of the opening chord on the organ, now subdued, beneath a solo piccolo: Pan is momentarily sated before the final climax begins, growing from a pulse in the bass instruments, the heartbeat of the sleeping orchestra slowly increasing to the final wild frenzy.

Alissa Firsova's Bergen's Bonfire also balances a tension between peace and destruction, transforming the orchestra into a Ragnarökian battleground. The tripartite structure moves from the battle of the gods, through a vision of Mount Fløyen, to a newly created universe, the notes in the score stating ‘The New World triumphs!’ With distinctly Mahlerian undertones throughout, the battle between good and evil was portrayed through a slightly reductive binary juxtaposition of chromaticism against diatonicism, which didn't quite match the subtlety of Andersson's tonal manipulation.

In the same programme was the world premiere of the revised version of Ørjan Matre's preSage, commissioned for the centenary of The Rite of Spring (which was performed as the second half of the concert). The translucent start to the piece called forth a world before the prehistoric setting of Stravinsky's Rite, string harmonics seeming to hold time in suspension. Initially, the links between the two works were barely perceivable, the spirit of The Rite hanging over the piece but never hampering it; an underlying violence bubbles beneath the surface of both works. As preSage progressed, however, the influence of the earlier work became more immediately apparent, with bassoon quotations and harmonic echoes interwoven into the piece such that it sounded like a musical commentary on The Rite. Both works, however, were somewhat upstaged by Alina Ibragimova's phenomenal performance of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. Her infectious enthusiasm produced a sparkling rendition of both this and Ysaÿe's Sonata No. 3 ‘Ballade’, offered as an encore.

With anniversary celebrations falling so close to one other, the orchestral music of Stravinsky, Sibelius and Nielsen has dominated concert halls in the last couple of years. Scheduling new works alongside provided a fresh perspective on this repertoire; I heard Tapiola anew when placed next to Beast Sampler, and found the dance rhythms from Aladdin to take on greater urgency in light of Andersson's Pan. With the vast resources at their disposal, the BBC Proms is in an enviable position to be able to programme creatively and commission such a formidable number of pieces, providing a stimulating platform (and deservedly large audiences) for these new works.