DANCE & MUSIC NEWS

BRIEFLY: Russian conductor and founder of the Russian National Orchestra Mikhail Pletnev, in town this week to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic in four performances of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, will be honored at a private reception on Sunday afternoon by the California-based Russian Arts Foundation. The 3-year-old foundation, created to support artists and arts organizations in Russia, will unveil a portrait of the 38-year-old composer that will hang in its San Francisco headquarters. . . .

Superstar designer Donna Karan has created the costumes for the new stage work “Snow on the Mesa,” by Robert Wilson, for the Martha Graham Dance Company. It premieres at the Kennedy Center in Washington Thursday. . . . Finalists in the annual Los Angeles District competition of the Metropolitan Opera, who compete Saturday night in Bovard Auditorium at USC, are sopranos Sari Gruber of La Crescenta, Shana Black Hill of Culver City and Elizabeth Kantartzis of Valley Village, and tenor William George of Long Beach. . . .

Yutaka Sado of Japan has been named the Leonard Bernstein Jerusalem Laureate Conductor. As part of the prize, Sado conducted the Jerusalem Symphony on the fifth anniversary of Bernstein’s death, Oct. 14. He also took home $25,000.. . . Closing its career after 26 years, the Cleveland Quartet (violinists William Preucil and Peter Salaff, violist James Dunham and cellist Paul Katz) is now on the road for the last time. Its 12-city tour, through Dec. 10, includes stops in San Francisco and New York.