The Juilliard School, which first opened its doors in October 1905 as the Institute for Musical Art, has been celebrating its 100th birthday all season with an expanded array of offerings embracing 47 newly commissioned works. There have also been some surprises, such as the donation in February by Bruce Kovner, the chairman of Juilliard’s board, of 139 musical autographs and other manuscripts and artifacts to the school. Although the season is winding down, several important events remain, including a program of new choral works by film composers on April 6 and the world premiere of Lowell Liebermann’s opera “Miss Lonelyhearts” on April 26.

Monday evening’s centennial gala at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater offered a neat and enjoyable encapsulation of the year. The event, telecast as part of the “Live From Lincoln Center” series on PBS, was a 90-minute celebration of Juilliard by Juilliard, including performances by some of its most renowned graduates and filmed tributes by others.

No doubt consideration for the television audience helped make the evening a fast-paced affair, without the tiresome speeches or surfeit of performances that can bog down galas. In one filmed excerpt, Robin Williams noted that, although he attended Juilliard, he never graduated, and he called the place “a bit like prison with cellos.”

As befits a school that offers training not only in classical music but also jazz, theater, and dance, the gala’s offerings were highly diverse, both in the variety of performing arts represented as well as in musical style.Wynton Marsalis introduced the jazz segment, stating that, “Learning to swing requires a long apprenticeship.” The seven-person ensemble that performed Mr. Marsalis’s “Free To Be Whatever You Want To Be” had obviously learned to swing, and the players took full advantage of the improvisatory element implied by the piece’s title within its defined formal structure.

Kevin Kline, backed by an ensemble of Juilliard drama students, delivered Hamlet’s Advice to the Players – an apt choice for the occasion – with an arresting mix of encouragement and jaded disdain. The dance division performed two excerpts from “Watershed,” as choreographed by Adam Hougland to Christopher Rouse’s music “Friandises”; this provided a sampling of some of the centennial commissions, since both the music and the choreography were new. Included were a neo-Romantic waltz with lush strings and a Stravinsky-like, musically inventive quick movement, both handsomely played by the Juilliard Orchestra under Andrea Quinn. The dancing offered a bracing mix of traditional ballet and modern dance elements.

The rest of the program was made up of classical compositions, if one includes the theme from “Schindler’s List” by John Williams, who conducted the bulk of the evening’s music. Mr. Williams’s soulful melody has a distinctly Eastern European quality and was played with searching expression by Itzhak Perlman. Mr. Perlman and the orchestra also played “Tambourin chinois,” an amusing tidbit of chinoiserie that found Mr. Perlman’s bow dancing agilely on the strings.

Renee Fleming sang arias from two operas not normally associated with her: “Vissi d’arte” from Puccini’s “Tosca” and the bolero “Merce dilette amiche” from Verdi’s “Sicilian Vespers.” In the “Tosca” excerpt she revealed a handsome and expressive lower range and sang with fine control, saving emotional passion until the very end. Her fine trill and agile staccato helped make the bolero a delight.

Emanuel Ax’s gripping performance with the Juilliard String Quartet of the third movement of Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34, with its throbbing syncopations, was tantalizingly brief. It made me wish they had gone on and finished the work.

The longest piece went to the youngest performer. The 13-year-old Chinese prodigy Peng Peng, a student in Juilliard’s pre-college division, played the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor. He has big hands for a young man and makes an accordingly big sound. You could always hear him, despite the orchestral surges around him, but his tone was never strident. He brought a nice degree of poetry and rhythmic looseness to the second theme and voiced the piano’s elaboration of the main theme at the start of the recapitulation handsomely. And he indulged in none of the visual distractions that can make performances by an older pianistic compatriot with a similar double name (Lang Lang) a chore to watch. Peng Peng is one to keep an eye on.