By no means synonymous with new music, Andris Nelsons has yet maintained the Boston Symphony’s illustrious track record for commissions since becoming its music director, as these premieres from 2016/17 demonstrate. Two of the works make ideal curtain-raisers – Erik Nathan’s the space of a door with its cumulative eliding between explosive tuttis and stealthy ensemble passages, and Timo Andres’s Everything Happens So Much, which is the nearest of these pieces to evoking those minimalist traits still prevalent in American music.

The other works are both multi-movement entities. Sonnets finds George Tsontakis drawing on Shakespeare for a concertante piece featuring cor anglais, its essentially ruminative nature to the fore in the subdued eloquence of the outer movements, but exuding sustained intensity then incisive nonchalance in the central brace of a cohesive sequence, rendered by Robert Sheena with laudable authority. Four artists are the starting point for Sean Shepherd’s Express Abstractionism, their combative and decidedly exploratory approach each paralleled in music that recalls Gunther Schuller’s Klee Studies in its freewheeling textural contrasts and recondite humour. If any ongoing continuity towards an integrated whole remains elusive, this is hardly the fault of Nelsons or his Boston players, whose execution is beyond reproach.

The sound exemplifies Symphony Hall’s renowned definition and immediacy, with succinctly informative notes by Robert Kirzinger. Interesting that relatively little of this music moves at a fast tempo – evidently not only the heyday of modernism was found wanting in this respect.