A Culturally Satisfying Year Lies Ahead : Arts: Throughout the San Gabriel Valley, a rich array of exhibits, concerts and theater is planned.

From Picasso and P.D.Q. Bach in Pasadena to Wynton Marsalis and “Lucia di Lammermoor” in Claremont, San Gabriel Valley cultural institutions have scheduled a rich array of artistic offerings for 1991.

With holiday tinsel and noisemakers safely stashed away in the attic for the season, now is the time to take a look at some highlights on the New Year’s cultural calendar.

Coming up this month, the Western Opera Theater presents Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” at Bridges Auditorium in Claremont Jan. 22. The Western Opera Theater is sponsored by the San Francisco Opera Center and has been touring for 23 years. “Lucia di Lammermoor” will be presented in English, and tickets are $17 to $27.

On display at Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum through March are two special lithography exhibits. One exhibit consists of 40 lithographs and linocuts by Pablo Picasso of female models and his lovers over a 20-year period beginning in 1945. Picasso produced nearly 3,000 graphics, more than any other artist, and is considered one of the great graphic artists in history along with Durer, Rembrandt and Goya.

The other graphics display at the Norton Simon includes works by 17 artists who were part of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop during the 1960s. The Los Angeles workshop, created in 1960 to revive the dying lithographic process, paired master printers with mature artists to train them in the art of printmaking. The results have drawn artists, students and scholars of fine prints from around the world to learn the art of lithography. Admission to the Norton Simon is $4 for adults, $2 for students and seniors over 62.

On March 30, 20-year-old cellist Allison Eldredge will be a guest soloist with the Pasadena Symphony in a program featuring Dmitri Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1. Eldredge was born into a musical family and began studying piano at age 3. She switched to the cello at age 9 and won her first competition within six months. In 1989, she received an Avery Fisher Career Grant and has become a featured soloist both in the United States and abroad.

Tickets for the program, which also includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and “Melting Voices” by Donald Crockett, are $12.50 to $29.50. The concert will be held at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.

February means orchids at the Huntington Library in San Marino, while March will bring environmentalists to the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum and a comedy of “money, power, greed and romance” to the Pasadena Playhouse.

The Huntington Library opens its orchid show on Feb. 8, examining the passion for orchid cultivation that developed in the Victorian era in Europe and the United States. The show includes more than 50 botanical illustrations, live orchid plants and Victorian watercolors. The flowers will grace the Huntington’s Library Exhibition Hall through June 2. Admission is $5 for adults.

The Arboretum’s annual environmental education fair takes place March 16. It will feature 65 exhibitors, as well as nature games and displays geared at teaching school-age children about environmental awareness. Admission is $3.

At the Playhouse, a comedy called “Other People’s Money” runs March 15 through April 28. Named “Best Off-Broadway Play” by the New York Outer Critics Circle in 1989, the show has also opened in Chicago and London and is being made into a movie starring Danny DeVito. Ticket prices have not been set.

Perhaps fittingly, it will be April 1 when Peter Schickele presents “P.D.Q. Bach’s Final Farewell to Touring Concert” with the Pasadena Symphony and conductor Jorge Mester at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Schickele’s 1989 classical music spoof album, “P.D.Q. Bach: 1712 Overture and Other Musical Assaults,” won a Grammy Award for best comedy recording. Tickets are $18 to $35.

On April 12, music of another kind will be featured at Bridges Auditorium in Claremont as jazz trumpet player Wynton Marsalis plays a one-night engagement with six other jazz musicians. Admission prices range from $15 to $25.

May brings the West Coast premiere of a little known Cole Porter musical farce to the Pasadena Playhouse. “You Never Know” was originally written as an intimate musical but it opened on Broadway in 1937 as a large-scale production that displeased Porter, according to Mary Anderson, playhouse spokeswoman.

Director Paul Lazarus has revived the show in productions in Connecticut and Boston and is bringing back the original flavor that Porter intended, Anderson said. It will play in Pasadena from May 17 through June 30. Ticket prices will be set later in the season.

The 200th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights will be celebrated this summer with an exhibit at the Huntington Library. The show will include rare original documents that tell the story of the amendments’ creation, from original letters penned by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, to first editions of influential printed works of that era. The exhibit opens July 4 and runs through January, 1992.

The fall brings an evening of song with mezzo-soprano Kimball Wheeler, the wife of conductor Jorge Mester, and a program of Ginastera’s Variaciones Concertantes and Franck’s Symphony in D minor by the Pasadena Symphony on Oct. 26. Tickets prices have not been determined.

Also in the fall, the Huntington plans a show surveying the history of gardens and garden buildings and their importance in the country life of Great Britain. Architecture, drawings, prints and watercolors from the National Trust of Great Britain will be featured.

Christmas, 1991, will bring back lots of old favorites, including the Arboretum’s annual open house, during which visitors get a once-a-year opportunity for guided tours through the Queen Anne cottage, which is normally closed to the public. The open house will be on Dec. 8.

Schedule changes are possible; patrons should check dates, times and admission information with the sponsoring institution.