Throughout a long and fertile career, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich has created works rich in character and emotion, and marked by impeccable craftsmanship. Those qualities are in healthy supply on this Boston Modern Orchestra Project recording of four Zwilich scores from the past quarter‑century. They demonstrate how deftly the American composer draws musicians, and their listeners, into narratives of immediate interest.

Who could resist the burst of energy with which Zwilich sends Upbeat! (1998) soaring into space? The theme is familiar – the opening of Bach’s Solo Violin Partita No 3 in E, BWV1006 – yet the vibrant colours and vivacious orchestral chatter sound freshly minted, as if the Candide Overture had been tweaked for a new era. It comes across as the overture to an operetta Zwilich never wrote (alas).

The moods, as the title indicates, are much more sombre in Concerto elegia for solo flute and strings, a tribute to Zwilich’s late husband, Erik LaMont. The three movements wend their way through despair, anger and consolation, with the flute grieving in poetic and mercurial phrases and the strings providing support or empathetic interaction. Sarah Brady takes the flute lines to the requisite extremes, shaping utterances with tonal lustre and expressive purpose.

Zwilich is back on bright turf in Commedia dell’arte for solo violin and orchestra (2012), which evokes the celebrated theatrical figures and the mirth they heaped on audiences from the 16th through 18th centuries. The characters of Arlecchino, Columbina and Capitano receive zany and vivid treatment, with the solo violin frolicking, flirting and preening in cahoots with a string complement that occasionally adds telling percussion details. The finale begins with an extended violin cadenza whose challenges, as throughout the work, Gabriela Díaz meets through a charismatic blend of flair and sensitivity.

The score of Zwilich’s Symphony No 5 (2008) bears the subtitle ‘Concerto for Orchestra’, which is reflected in the bold and varied instrumental writing, both of soloistic and ensemble persuasion. The composer – who became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music, in 1983 for her Symphony No 1 – traverses broad emotional territory in her four-movement Fifth Symphony. The opening movement is full of contrasting moods and rhythmic twists, and the second marches nervously. Composers who were oppressed are honoured in the affecting third movement, while Zwilich sets the finale in menacing, jazzy motion before bringing the work to a lonely close.

All of the repertoire is played with intense drama and suavity by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project led by Gil Rose, a champion of living composers with a keen ear for texture, balance and dramatic contrast.