American Ballet Theater continued its focus on American choreographers on Wednesday night at City Center with the premiere of John Neumeier's "Getting Closer," set to Ned Rorem's String Symphony.

But his String Symphony, conducted by Ermanno Florio, is eminently danceable.

String Symphony - Voices (Balsis)

WQXR-FM, which plays classical music, went off the air at 1:26 P.M., silencing Mendelssohn's String Symphony No. 12 in G Minor.

The rest of the program, Mendelssohn's String Symphony No. 10 and Haydn's Symphony No. 49, stressed youthful passion rather than the pastoral repose one might have expected on Christmas Eve.

At the first of these, the group's music director, Thomas Crawford, conducts a Concerto Grosso by Corelli, the "Battalia" by Heinrich Biber and the String Symphony by Shostakovich.

The program includes two other works for strings: Mendelssohn's Sinfonia (sometimes called String Symphony) No. 8 and the "Adagio" of Samuel Barber.

In this context, the Shostakovich that came to mind was less the String Symphony than the first movement of the "Leningrad" Symphony, of 1941, for which Bartok's Adagio might have been a miniature model.

"Night Dance" was danced to the 1975 "Night Music" by Marie-Christine Mouis and Alexandre Proia; "An Annotated Tale," to the 1985 String Symphony by Mr. Byrd's company.

The 65-year-old American composer won a Grammy Award this year for his "String Symphony," and in 1976 his "Air Music" won a Pulitzer Prize.