As anniversaries go, a sesquicentennial may lack the obvious punch of a centennial or bicentennial. (Don’t bother to look it up; a sesquicentennial is a 150th anniversary.) But the classical-music world will take any anniversary it can get.

That the two great Scandinavian symphonists — the Finn Jean Sibelius and the Dane Carl Nielsen — were both born in 1865 comes as a little bonanza to orchestras this year, especially Scandinavian ones. So it was no surprise when the Danish National Symphony Orchestra performed Sibelius’s “Valse Triste” and Violin Concerto and Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony (“Inextinguishable”) at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday evening.

It is fascinating to compare and contrast the composers, not only in their sound-worlds, each a distinctive blend of heat and cold, and in their innovative approaches to musical form but also in their biographies and posthumous reputations. Nielsen wrote six symphonies from 1891 to 1925 and died in 1931. Sibelius wrote seven from 1899 to 1924 but ran plumb out of creative steam soon thereafter, though he lived until 1957.

Sibelius’s reputation fluctuated for a time but now seems solidly established. Nielsen’s never achieved such heights, despite occasional stirrings of interest like the current one sparked by Alan Gilbert at the New York Philharmonic.