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.

The work opens with a poem by Prithwindra Mukherjee, Danse Cosmique, an ode to Shiva, destroyer of the world. Dutilleux calls for a fairly sparse orchestral texture, with beautiful color created by instrumental effects like flutter-tonguing in the flutes and trombone slides. Alongside the dissonance, often grating, we are accustomed to hearing in Dutilleux's music, there were sections of lush, post-Romantic harmony, almost as if a page of a John Williams score had gotten mixed in with the NSO's scores. In the Interlude before the second song, the warm reedy breath of the accordion made its first charming appearance, a sound that is deeply infused with nostalgia, at least for me. The second song uses the text of a letter sent by dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to none other than Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, Galina, thanking them for the sacrifices they had made in helping him survive the trials he suffered at the hands of the Soviet authorities. Dutilleux set the words as a long, slow recitative, with some loud sections that sometimes swallowed Upshaw's voice, whose sweet, fragile sound is balanced by an impeccable purity and emotional drive.

There are two short movements (Gong and Gong 2) with texts by poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In the first, the orchestra punctuates the soft vocal melody with gong-like splats of sound. The second is even more evocative, with the return of that murmuring accordion and the shimmering battery of metallic percussion in a gorgeous postlude. The piece climaxes in its final movement with the emotional letter of Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo, about his painting The Night Cafe. The difficulty of life, Van Gogh wrote, is that "next to the sun of the Good Lord, there is the Mistral Devil three-quarters of the time," the depression that can take hold of you in a lonely cafe, leading you to "ruin oneself, become crazy, commit crimes." At the conclusion of an extraordinary performance by Dawn Upshaw and the NSO, the final line ended in a heart-wrenching wail of desperation.

The concert began less auspiciously, with another Rostropovich commission, a "political overture" called Slava! that Leonard Bernstein composed for Rostropovich's first season with the NSO. By this point in his career, Bernstein's lesser works sound like bad parodies of Bernstein, and this piece, while fun and short enough to be quickly forgotten, is no exception. None of the composer's tricks -- including parts for saxophone and electric guitar, prerecorded tape of a political speech cheered by a crowd, or having the orchestra shout "Slava!" (Rostropovich's nickname) at the end -- make it any better. By contrast, musical quality was certainly not the problem with Benjamin Britten's Four Sea Interludes, the orchestral pieces that divide the action in the disturbing, beautiful opera Peter Grimes. The NSO and Rostropovich rendered these gorgeous pieces in a not particularly clean way, lacking a sense of unity and clarity, although the beauty of the score still made the performance enjoyable.

To make sure that the sadly sparse audience stayed through the modern repertoire, the second half of the program was devoted to Dvořák's Eighth Symphony, a Romantic barn-burner sure to please a conservative listener. Here, too, there were impressive masses of sound, but at the same time I did not have the sense of a grand plan from the conductor. The sweeping Romantic gestures of the third movement were convincing, especially in the repeat of the A section, where Rostropovich brought the melody down in volume to emphasize the bubbly woodwind accompaniment figures. Although there was good playing generally from the woodwinds, including a fine oboe solo in the third movement trio, there were minor intonation problems in the second movement. In the quick coda of the third movement, the woodwinds got behind by a beat or so, causing Rostropovich to shake his head at them and at the end of the movement to scold them a bit. The fourth movement gave the crowd what it wanted, in a series of booming variations heavy with brass.

This excellent concert will be repeated this evening (April 28, 8 p.m.) and Saturday evening (April 29, 8 p.m.). Tickets: $20 to $79. Students may still be able to purchase special $10 tickets, for tonight's performance only, through the Kennedy Center's Attend! program.