Renée Fleming, for many people, is the embodiment of divadom, so it can come as a surprise to learn that she has always been drawn to new music – the legacy, one suspects, of her studies with the great contemporary music singer Jan DeGaetani. Fleming's artistry, meanwhile, was the inspiration for Henri Dutilleux's song cycle Le Temps L'Horloge, which she premiered in Paris in 2009. Valery Gergiev's latest concert with the London Symphony Orchestra included the work's first UK performance.

One of music's greatest craftsmen, Dutilleux, 96 this year, never ceases to amaze. Le Temps L'Horloge takes French surrealist poetry as the starting point for a meditation on the dichotomy between time measured out by clocks and time experienced existentially. The piece has a sting in its tail, however, for the final song is a mocking setting of Baudelaire's Enivrez-vous, which impertinently suggests we should forget about time and its effects by getting drunk.

It's ravishingly scored, with a harpsichord and an accordion threading their way through Dutilleux's sleazy, but infinitely suave textures. Fleming is by turns rapturous, supremely poised and witty in it, while the subtlety of the orchestral writing brought out the best in Gergiev, too.

Fleming's second offering of the evening was Ravel's Shéhérazade; another great performance in which eroticism and artifice were held in perfect balance, both vocally and orchestrally. The concert began, meanwhile, with Debussy's La Mer and ended with Stravinsky's Petrushka, both of which Gergiev has given us before on a regular basis. His interpretation of the Debussy tends to wildness rather than refinement, though an element of exaggeration with regard to dynamics has seemingly crept in. His Petrushka, similarly, now betrays a fondness for extreme speeds, but remains wonderfully detailed and thrillingly intense.