The death last year of Steven Stucky (1949-2016) went largely unremarked amid the relentless, almost daily cavalcade of loss in 2016, but with hindsight his may come to be one of the most keenly felt. The 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winner for his Second Orchestral Concerto, the largest and earliest work here is the First (1987, here unnumbered), a bold, tripartite design. The exploratory central Adagio takes half the running time and is framed by two terser, faster spans. Written for the Philadelphia Orchestra, the superb ensemble-writing is interleaved with a wealth of soloistic writing, usually clustered in groups.

The Concerto’s musical style is more radical than the couplings, showing the influence of Lutosawski (though, ironically, not the Polish master’s own Concerto). In the millennial song-cycle American Muse (1999), Stucky’s language had opened out and softened a little. The four poems set – by John Berryman, EE Cummings (the brilliant ‘Buffalo Bill’s’), AR Ammons and Whitman – are melded into a sequence of Britten-like logic and expressive acuity (there are some Brittenish orchestral textures, too). It is a marvellous cycle, sung strongly by Sanford Sylvan, who premiered it.

The most recent work is the opening Rhapsodies (2008), a knockout concert-opener written for the New York Philharmonic and Lorin Maazel, and premiered at the 2008 Proms during a European tour. A kaleidoscope of textures and colours, Rhapsodies is brilliantly scored like a miniature concerto for orchestra. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project perform it with élan, as they do all the works here, under Gil Rose’s sympathetic direction. Fine sound rounds out a very attractive disc.