Most people now associate the words “classical music” so strongly with the past that it is easy to forget that composers are still writing music for those traditional vehicles of art music — opera, symphony, chamber ensembles. Soprano Dawn Upshaw urges us regularly not to forget this very fact, by lending her radiant voice to so many new compositions. Indeed, she has become the muse of many contemporary composers, the favored midwife at numerous musical births. In 2003, she premiered Correspondances, a new orchestral song cycle by French composer Henri Dutilleux (b. 1916), with conductor Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. The composer then revised the work, adding another movement, and now Dawn Upshaw has come to Washington to perform the United States premiere final version for her first appearance with the National Symphony Orchestra. Of course, DCist was at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall last night to listen.

Reappearing at the podium was Mstislav Rostropovich, who led the NSO from 1977 to 1994. Rostropovich, too, has a history with Dutilleux, having been the dedicatee of the composer’s cello concerto, Tout un monde lointain…, and having premiered a new commission from Dutilleux in his first season with the NSO, Timbres, espace, mouvement, ou La nuit étoilée, inspired by Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night. He and the orchestra appeared to have focused significant rehearsal time on the Dutilleux, which was definitely the concert’s centerpiece. In Correspondances Dutilleux set five mostly unrelated texts that deal with the theme of glimpses of transcendence through dark moments in life. The title was used by Charles Baudelaire for a famous poem in Les Fleurs du Mal, but it also refers to the fact that most of the texts are not poems at all but eloquent letters written by artists.