Nadja Salerno Sonnenberg

For its 2013-14 season, the Broad Stage in Santa Monica will present appearances by actress Patti LuPone, opera singer Bryn Terfel, violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and the Los Angeles dance group Bodytraffic. Members of the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela will also perform in a concert during the coming season, which the Broad announced Monday.  Leaders at the Broad also announced a new initiative designed to bolster the company's jazz offerings. A new Jazz Council, which will curate performances and events, will consist of Quincy Jones, Herb Alpert, Ruth Price, Jeff Gauthier, Joon Lee, Daniel Seeff, Luciana Souza and Ben Wendel.

A weeklong festival devoted to the beloved American composer Aaron Copland and the West Coast premiere of Richard Danielpour's "Voices of Remembrance"--a memorial to three slain national leaders--will highlight the Pacific Symphony's 2000-01 season. Music director Carl St.Clair will conduct Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" and "Lincoln Portrait," among other works, as part of a festival of films, lectures and concerts honoring the Copland centenary Nov. 12-19. Details will be announced.

Architecture should evoke strong opinions, and I respect the right of critics to "call them as they see them." But Nicolai Ouroussoff's review of the Orange County Performing Arts Center's new Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall errs on several points--some unrelated to architecture ("Concert Hall Design Misses the High Notes," Oct. 30). In his critique, Ouroussoff states that the new venue, designed by renowned architect Cesar Pelli, has a "conventional, unimaginative design."

One of the lessons the students at the summertime Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute learn right away, says Daniel Lewis, is "how tight the professional musician's schedule must be." And that lesson has been learned well by the current crop of young players as Lewis has worked at the institute a fortnight. He presides tonight over the second concert of the summer by the Institute Orchestra, at 7:30 in Hollywood Bowl.

The evening certainly began with a bang. Carl St.Clair, the ever-enterprising music-director of the cautiously adventurous Pacific Symphony, introduced his program Wednesday night at the Performing Arts Center with some clangorous riffs and roars. But this was no ordinary event. It could not open with an ordinary fanfare. This was a rare evening devoted exclusively to music of the 20th Century. Even more dangerous, perhaps, it was an evening devoted to American music of the 20th Century.

On paper, it looked like a fascinating concert. In the too wide, too open spaces of the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Monday, it turned out to be a major miscalculation. The enterprising Philharmonic Society had programmed an intimate evening of sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms to be performed by two extraordinarily talented young musicians: the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and the pianist Cecile Licad. So far, so provocative and so sophisticated.

The UCLA Center for the Performing Arts and the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts have announced their eclectic 1995-96 seasons. At UCLA, program highlights include two Los Angeles premieres--Philip Glass' opera for ensemble and film, "La Belle et la Be^te," based on Jean Cocteau's 1946 film, and Mark Morris' staging of Gluck's "Orfeo ed Euridice." The Cerritos Center will present its first commissioned work, the jazz piece "Sounds Without Nouns," by Anthony Davis of New York.

The Pasadena Symphony may not be the most progressive organization in the area, but it does seem to be keeping up with its orchestral neighbors. Admirably. Earlier this month, the mighty Los Angeles Philharmonic opened its doors with a telling survey of 20th-Century music under Esa-Pekka Salonen. This was followed a few nights later by a similarly adventurous repertory excursion by Valery Gergiev and his vaunted charges from the Kirov Theater in St. Petersburg.