Jade Simmons says a former manager didn’t know how to market her. Go figure.

She is a classical pianist, a Webcast host, a frequent business lecturer on the importance of marketing and branding for classical musicians, and although she doesn’t mention it unless asked, she was the first runner-up in the Miss America 2000 pageant as Miss Illinois.

She also toured the country speaking about suicide prevention. So when her manager asked how she wanted to be presented to concert organizers, she told him to concentrate on…all of it.

“Tell them that I’m the best darn package deal they’re ever going to have come play on their series,” she said. “Now the wonderful advantage that I’m finding that I’m having is that presenters are seeking me out because of that … I allow myself to do things that will offer inspiration, information and entertainment. That’s what the brand is, and it’s been working for me.”

On Monday, Simmons will come to the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse for the first of the center’s Young Artists series this season. Her program will be built around the idea of variation, specifically violinist Nicolo Paganini’s apparently immortal “24th Caprice,” which has been used by a wide variety of composers as the basis for flights of virtuosic fancy.

Simmons has scheduled three treatments of the piece: Liszt’s “Paganini Caprice No. 6,” American composer Robert Mucyzinski’s “Desperate Measures,” and the contemporary Turkish pianist and composer Fazil Say’s “Paganini Jazz.”

She’ll also offer several pieces by her favorite composer, Sergei Rachmaninov (who also wrote a hugely popular work for piano and orchestra based on the same Paganini tune), including the “Prelude” (in C-sharp minor, Op. 3, No. 2), one of the Op. 39 “Etudes-Tableaux” (No. 2 in A minor) and the “Corelli Variations” (Op. 42), which Rachmaninov based on “La Folia,” a venerable Spanish dance tune with roots in the 15th century that he encountered in a sonata by the Baroque Italian composer and violinist Arcangelo Corelli.

“The biggest compliment I have ever gotten was when I was in Italy at a Rachmaninov festival, and I was playing this Etude-Tableau,” she said, referring to the piece on Monday’s program. “A group of Russians came up to me and said, ‘You must be Russian’ … so there’s something there I relate to.”

Simmons, 34, earned her bachelor’s at Northwestern University and her master’s at Rice University in Houston, where she now lives with her air traffic controller husband, Jahrell, and their 5-year-old son, Jaden.

The full range of her activities and recordings can be seen at jademedia.org, her website, and while she clearly enjoys stretching the boundaries and reaching as wide an audience as possible, her art still comes back to first principles.

“It’s funny: as much as I love pushing the envelope, playing with electronics, usually when I do it for a while, all I want to do is play Beethoven afterwards,” she said.

The recital begins at 7:30 p.m. Monday. Tickets are $30. Call 832-7469 or visit www.kravis.org.

Mendelssohn in Boca: The Beijing-born violinist Dan Zhu opens the new season of concerts by the Boca Raton Symphonia this weekend with the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (in E minor, Op. 64). Zhu first played it at a concert in his native city at the age of 9.

“Every time when I re-study the piece, the music itself always offers so much for me to discover, endless layers to unfold,” Zhu wrote in an email Sunday on a plane from Beijing to Paris. “The concerto is perfectly written for the soloist and the orchestra, in such (a) compact form for the three movements closely linking to one another … almost like how a classic love story develops.”

Now based in New York, the 30-year-old Zhu trained at Beijing’s Central Conservatory, where his classmates included the pianist Lang Lang, and came to the United States at 16 to study with Lucie Robert at the Mannes School of Music in New York. He’s won major international contests such as Britain’s Queen Elizabeth Competition, and he says he divides his time roughly equally among America, Asia and Europe.

Boca Symphonia director Philippe Entremont was Zhu’s first European mentor, having heard him audition at the Fontainebleau Academy, and invited him to play the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Orchestre National de France, Zhu wrote. “Since then we have collaborated not only in concerto performances (but) also in duo recitals and chamber music,” he wrote. “I have admired his artistry … since my childhood.”

On Sunday’s concert, Entremont also will conduct Rossini’s overture to his opera Il Signor Bruschino, Aaron Copland’s suite from his ballet score Appalachian Spring, and an American rarity, the Sinfonietta of the composer and pedagogue Walter Piston.

Zhu, who makes a point of wearing concert attire from the high-end New York couture house Blanc de Chine, wrote that while competition in classical music has always been “intense,” his focus is on serving the music.

“The most important quality in performing for me is to share the story of each piece, and bring the beauty of the music itself, through my personal voice, to the public,” he wrote.

Sunday’s concert starts at 4 p.m. Tickets range from $35-$62. Call 376-3848 or visit www.bocasymphonia.org.