Mark Likes Music

It was great to see the New York Philharmonic ring in the new year with its all-American program of Copland, Gershwin, and show tunes with Thomas Hampson. This is entertaining music, and certainly more a part of New York culture than the dusty old 19th-century European stuff the orchestra did last year.  Alan Gilbert has made a strong commitment (at least relative to most) to American music this season, and that's a good thing. It's invigorated the orchestra and its audiences too. Struggling orchestras such as the Charlotte Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra might do well to follow the Phil's lead. Don't assume that people want the usual classical-music standards all the time. And don't apologize for presenting American music that's new to audiences--believe in it, make it an important part of your programming. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

From now until January 11, you can stream the first concert in the New York Philharmonic's Contact! series  at the orchestra's website, nyphil.org. There are also videos with one of the composers, Arthur Kampela, Alan Gilbert, who founded the series, and Magnus Lindberg, who conducted the December 17 show at Symphony Space on the Upper West Side. WQXR.org, which also webcast the concert on their Q2 stream, has interviews with the composers and critical reaction from various bloggers on their site.

Christmas is over, but there's no reason to stop listening to music for the season. Here are some suggestions of things that haven't yet become holiday classics, but which deserve hearing while you're still in the mood. Written in 1927, A Carol Symphony by British composer Victor Hely-Hutchinson is an honest-to-goodness four-movement symphony based on traditional holiday tunes. It's entertaining as all get-out, and deserves to be played more often this time of year. Of course, Naxos has a recording of A Carol Symphony available. A Carol Symphony - Allegro ene... Though not strictly a Christmas piece, David Lang's Little Match Girl Passion  reminds us that this is a time of year to remember the neediest. Lang's 30-minute meditation on Hans Christian Andersen's short story about a poor girl who dies alone in the cold on New Year's Eve received its world premiere at Carnegie Hall  in 2007. Another contemporary American work, John Adams's  El

It's been a tough year for the Charlotte Symphony, but the group has met its 2009 fundraising goals , according to the Charlotte Observer, with a rush of donations that began in August with a $500,000 challenge grant.

This past summer, I had the chance to talk with Veronica Parrales, a New York City cellist who grew up a student in Manhattan's Third Street Music School Settlement school and community partnerships. She now teaches in the program, and you can read her story in an article I wrote for Third Street's fall newsletter .

The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte is set to open January 2 and hosted a media sneak-peek yesterday . Another video is up at the Charlotte Observer's website .

Something's going on in Charlotte. On Saturday, only a few months after the city's orchestra was bailed out by former Bank of America head Hugh McColl and the C. D. Spangler Foundation, a new performance space, the Knight Theater , hosted an open house . The 1,150-seat hall is part of the so-called Wells Fargo Cultural Campus, a two-block-long strip on South Tryon Street that includes new homes for the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture and the Mint Museum , as well the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art , set to open in January. Further uptown, the North Carolina Dance Theatre is building its own headquarters, complete with administrative offices, a costume shop, and, most importantly, six studios for rehearsals and teaching. There are also plans to open a black box theater within the 34,000-square-foot space, which sits beside the ten-year-old McColl Center for Visual Art . This mini-boom shows that there's definitely philanthropic interest in beautifyi