BIG ART has come to the Big Apple with a vengeance this year. Late in 2004 came the opening of the Jazz at Lincoln Centre concert venues and the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art. And in February, The Gates, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the married couple who “wrapped” buildings such as the Reichstag in Berlin, transformed Central Park with 7,500 orange fabric “gates” suspended from metal frames, lining 37km (23 miles) of the park’s paths.

But there are other New York cultural treats. I started with jazz in The Allen Room, one of three new performance spaces at the Lincoln Centre, housed in the new Time Warner Centre overlooking Central Park.

I spent a lovely evening listening to Bill Henderson, a jazz singer who has worked with Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie. Until I took my seat in the tiered auditorium I did not realise the stage’s backdrop was a wall of plate glass, giving the audience a fabulous view across the southern end of Central Park and to Fifth Avenue and beyond.

Jazz at Lincoln Centre has been designed as a showcase for this undeniably American art form, and claims to offer the best jazz acoustics in the world. Its artistic director, the trumpet player Wynton Marsalis, explained at its opening: “Most of the time we play in halls that have too much echo for our music, so we’re going to have a hall where the sound is made for us.”

The next morning I trudged half a dozen blocks through the snow to the newly reopened Museum of Modern Art. Despite a blizzard dropping a foot of snow on the city, which I hoped would deter visitors, there was a 100-yard queue for admission (best advice is to avoid Sundays).

The six-storey museum, dramatically remodelled by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, now has almost twice as much display space as it didbefore it closed in May 2002 for its 30-month reconstruction. Taniguchi has maximised the light by introducing skylights, picture windows and cutting away interior walls to produce large, angular spaces.

There’s plenty that is familiar here, such as Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and work by such artists as Miró, Brancusi, Warhol, Mondrian and Matisse. But it is the larger pieces that are now especially memorable in their new home.

HQ for my cultural weekend was the new Mandarin Oriental hotel, also housed in the Time Warner Centre and which, as it’s on the 35th to the 54th floors of this skyscraper, offers wonderful views. The hotel scores further points by being in the same building as Jazz at Lincoln Centre. Given New York’s recent snow, you’ll be glad to find you can keep your shoes dry by getting to a concert without going outside.

Need to know

Getting there: Cath Urquhart flew to New York with British Airways (0870 8509850, www.ba.com), which this month has return flights from £322. She stayed at the Mandarin Oriental hotel (001 212 805 8800, www.mandarinorientalcom). Seasons in Style (0151-342 0505 www.seasonsinstyle.co.uk) offers four nights’ room-only at the Mandarin Oriental from £1,435pp based on two sharing a Central Park view room, including BA flights from London and private transfers.

Jazz at Lincoln Center: 001 212 258 9800, www.jalc.org.

Museum of Modern Art: 708 9400, www.moma.org.

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