April 22, 1983

The Reagan Administration's ambitious plan to remove wellhead price controls on natural gas survived its first major challenge today when the Senate Energy Committee defeated a move to put members on record against decontrolling inexpensive ''old'' gas. Although the sense of the committee resolution offered by Howard M. Metzenbaum, an Ohio Democrat, was not binding, the 10-to-8 vote against it meant that the decontrol of old gas had the support of half the members. There were two abstentions: John Melcher of Montana and Spark M. Matsunaga of Hawaii, both Democrats. ''There is support out there for decontrolling natural gas,'' an Energy Department spokesman commented. ''We think it's a good first step.''

A chart in Business Day Wednesday listing acquisitions of regional brokerage houses by other firms included two errors. The New Court Securities Corporation, which changed its name last year to Rothschild Inc., has not been acquired. Hartford Insurance acquired only a 25 percent interest in Wheat, First Securities Inc.

One of two bodies dug up on Staten Island was identified today as that of a 17-year-old Brick Township girl who disappeared on Halloween night in 1981, and the Monmouth County Prosecutor said he would seek a murder indictment in the case. The Prosecutor, Alexander D. Lehrer, said the girl, Maria Ciallella, had been walking home along Route 88 when she was picked up and killed by gunshots to the head. The killer, he said, was Richard F. Biegenwald, who is suspected of slaying at least four other people in New Jersey. The two bodies were found Tuesday morning in the backyard of Mr. Biegenwald's mother on Staten Island.

NEW YORK being the cultural center it is, many weekends during the season offer a bubbling variety of contemporary-music concerts, but this weekend seems hyperkinetically active. Composers and performers can be found purveying music that reaches from the most refined products of an ''uptown,'' complex sensibility to the meditative or abrasive effusions of the downtowners, from mainstream 20th-century European masters to eccentric Americans, from earnest academics to musicians who used to play jazz but who now work in a style called ''music from the jazz tradition'' - which they rightly espouse as just as legitimate a form of contemporary composition as any other. Highlights include two major British groups here courtesy of the Britain Salutes New York festival, a fascinating program of jazzbased composers working in classical idioms, several important jazz concerts highlighted by two Sonny Rollins shows at Town Hall, an all-20th-century organ-and-orchestra program with Anthony Newman, a microcomputer electronic-music festival at the Public Access Synthesizer Studio and a Frederic Rzewski piano recital at the Third Street Music School Settlement. The most prominent of the English groups is the Fires of London, which will perform three programs tonight, tomorrow and Sunday at Symphony Space. This is Peter Maxwell Davies's group, Mr. Davies being one of the liveliest, boldest and most important British composers of the present day.

Orders to factories for durable goods edged up three-tenths of 1 percent in March, the Commerce Department reported today. Increases for military hardware, machinery and household goods outweighed declines for the transportation industries and primary metals. The new overall gain was the fourth in the past five months and marked a rebound from the revised 3.5 percent decline in February.