Verizon Hall

MUSIC Sweets for the Sweet We're turning the time machine back to 1991 Friday night so pop-rocker Matthew Sweet can relive the glories of his then-big breakthrough album "Girlfriend" in all its sugar tart, Big Star-meets-Beatles glory — from "I've Been Waiting" to "Looking at the Sun. " The stuff still sounds great, though lines like "When you say to me, I'm not so old" carry a different smirk 20 years later. Get there in time for talented triller Callaghan, a U.K.-to-Atlanta transplant showcasing country-tinged material off her "Life in Full Color" album.

More entertainment, less art? The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, grappling with a series of discrete financial pressures, is shifting away from being a distinct presenting entity, relying more on partnerships with commercial outfits such as AEG and Live Nation, while giving breaks in rent to its own resident companies. Gone next season: the critically acclaimed Great Orchestra series, as well as Keyboard Conversations. The Kimmel's lively Summer Solstice celebration has been canceled this year for lack of money (though plans call for it to return every other year, starting in 2014)

Resolving the most quarrelsome aspect of its bankruptcy, the Philadelphia Orchestra Association has settled with the national musicians' pension fund that had threatened expensive and time-consuming litigation over the orchestra's withdrawal from the fund. The American Federation of Musicians and Employers' Pension Fund (AFM-EPF), which had filed a $35 million claim in the case, will drop all its legal challenges in exchange for $1.75 million from the orchestra. The development allows the orchestra to approach bankruptcy Judge Eric L. Frank with an uncontested reorganization plan, which means - if the orchestra can wrap up talks with the Kimmel Center over a new lease - that it could be out of bankruptcy within 90 days.

By turning toward conducting, Joshua Bell appears to have become a born-again violinist. His arrival as music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields on Monday at the Kimmel Center might have suggested that he's moving away from the repertoire and art on which he made his name — as so many have before him. Paradoxically, however, the opposite has happened. Though Bell has long been one of the most consistent of A-list violinists, recent Philadelphia Orchestra concerto appearances suggested that he had grown a bit comfortable, his playing lacking immediacy aside from his self-authored cadenzas.

The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia has never been Glamour Central — its audiences don't need that sort of thing — but the orchestra's status certainly wasn't hurt by a triple dose of that commodity over the weekend. Opera star Jessye Norman unexpectedly delivered an unaccompanied spiritual at Saturday's Lifetime Achievement Award Gala, which also came with a performance by her superb protégé, Canadian mezzo-soprano Susan Platts. On Sunday at the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater, the orchestra's concluding concert program of the season (repeated Monday at Perelman, and to be heard again Tuesday at the Temple Performing Arts Center)

In a world of shifting musical genres and fickle audiences, what is the pops orchestra of 2012 and beyond? Our own plucky example of the ensemble species, Peter Nero and the Philly Pops, is in the process of rebuilding itself even as it ponders the question. Tuesday, to emphasize its move from offices on Broad Street to Walnut, the group puts on a dog-and-pony show with a parade of Pops musicians and Mummers - ceremony catching up with reality. The Pops split from the Philadelphia Orchestra Association in the wake of a failed five-year merger agreement brokered with the help of former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo.

The job of an orchestra has always been to walk a queasy line between leading public taste and following it, but you might excuse the Philadelphia Orchestra for leaning into the latter territory more often lately, given its precarious state. This is a year for learning to love the Philadelphians again. Friday night's program reinforced the notion that if you give a certain large slice of the listenership what it wants, it will delight. Here it was Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 with Nikolaï Lugansky - in other words, a piece that has been building a fan base in Philadelphia for nearly a century, played by a pianist with buzz.

Best Music Writing 2011 Alex Ross, guest editor, and Daphne Carr, series editor Da Capo Press. 336 pp. $16 As a classical flutist, I had no idea I'd be interested in hearing Ke$ha's song "TiK ToK. " But Jonathan Bogart's fun essay "Keep Tickin and Tockin Work It All Around the Clock" persuaded me to download it - if only to find out what he means by the singer's "party-past-the-point-of-fun agenda. " Why she'd want to blow her speakers up remains a mystery.

The Kimmel Center's grand opening 10 years ago was a model of how not to do it. The performing arts center was so far from finished in its opening week that at one concert musicians gamely wore hard hats. Verizon Hall's out-of-control air-conditioning led bejeweled patrons at the opening gala to joke about seeing indoor snow flurries. The acoustics inhabited the opposite end of the weather index: The Washington Post's critic called the hall "an acoustical Sahara. " "You ask, 'My gosh, why wasn't this done right the first time around?

With its recent tumult of labor strife and money woes, the Kimmel Center seems an unlikely site to stage a musical spring. Yet there it was last weekend, the irrepressible stirring of renewal. At Saturday morning's first Philadelphia Orchestra family concert this year, cellist John-Henry Crawford, 18, a Curtis student and winner in the orchestra's Albert M. Greenfield Student Competition, projected polished charisma and a singing sound in the first movement of Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto . His was only one voice among a hundred the next afternoon at the season's first outing of the Curtis Institute of Music orchestra beyond its luxurious new tailor-built rehearsal room.