Rising (for flute and string orchestra) (2009)

This album from the dependable Boston Modern Orchestra Project, an orchestra devoted to contemporary music, spotlights four terrific concertos with expert soloists.

At 83, with a career spanning more than 60 years, Tower remains one of the deans of American classical composition, an important pathbreaker in the long struggle of women composers to be accorded the respect and visibility—make that audibility—in our musical life comparable to those of their male peers.

Action and reaction are, as Tower pointed out, dynamic elements common to her music. She sends the flute protagonist through a series of upwardly spiraling scales, mostly chromatic, set against the contrasting static and downward motions of the accompanying strings. Their dialogues are nothing if not inventive: at times scampering and playful, at times pensive and lyrical, each side sparking the other.

Like Tower’s other solidly constructed music, Rising reminds us that tonal harmonic conservatism need not feel stale or reactionary to today’s ears as long as the composer has something personal to express and the surety of craft to express it.

The winning rapid-fire exchanges between soloist and ensemble were expressively designed to show off the virtuosity of the eminent flutist Carol Wincenc, who gave the premiere. The solo duties were taken on this occasion by Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson, the CSO’s splendid principal flute. He made the score’s modest flashes of bravura very much his own, bringing amazing articulation and a wide palette of tonal colors to the score’s lucidly plotted trajectory. In so doing, he earned a rousing ovation that he shared with his string colleagues and the composer.