Carolina Chocolate Drops are on tour in North America, performing music from their new album, Leaving Eden, in New England this week. During a recent tour stop in NYC, the band performed three songs off the album live on WNYC's Soundcheck and spoke with host John Schaefer about the new album. Listen to the show and watch the performance of "Boodle-De-Bum-Bum" here. Glide gives the album four stars: "On Leaving Eden, Carolina Chocolate Drops move music forward, paying homage to the past while remaining rooted in the present. The result is a thoroughly enjoyable work that challenges our definition of string band music."

Punch Brothers are currently on tour in North America, performing in the Pacific Northwest this week. Prior to heading out on tour, the band spent some time with The New Yorker’s Alec Wilkinson for a "Talk of the Town" piece published in this week’s magazine. Punch Brothers was recently in Minneapolis and stopped by MPR's The Current to perform a few songs and discuss their new album, which PopMatters calls "an essential document and a mesmerizing step forward." Listen to the show and watch their performance of "Movement and Location" in The Current studios here.

The new album pairing works by Krzysztof Penderecki and the works they inspired by Jonny Greenwood is due out next week and is streaming in full all this week as an NPR First Listen. "The results are ear-tingling," says NPR's Anastasia Tsioulcas. "What we hear on this album is a meeting of two artistic visionaries connected in a real dialogue, the decades separating their work and their chronological ages all but collapsed and deflated."

Randy Newman continues his tour of Europe with stops in Germany this week, following several shows in the UK and Ireland last week that brought rave reviews, not least five-star reviews of his London show from the Guardian and the Independent. "Newman’s songs express a set of values and concerns that touch on the work of other greats—Toms Waits and Lehrer both spring to mind, likewise Stephen Sondheim—but he remains essentially uncategorisable," says the Independent. "On occasions the experience—a packed auditorium, an artist alone on stage with his piano—was akin to a Schubert recital, so exquisite and so deft was Newman’s rendering of human experience." The Times insists "that Newman's work as a songwriter and social commentator is quite simply peerless."

Amadou & Mariam are set to release Folila, their first studio album since Welcome to Mali, on April 10. The new album, helmed by longtime producer Marc-Antoine Moreau, epitomizes the duo's embrace of collaboration, with contributions by Santigold, TV on the Radio, Nick Zinner, Theophilus London, Bassekou Kouyate, and others. It is now available to pre-order in the Nonesuch Store. Hear the album track "Dougou Badia" and watch the couple's performance of "Wily Kataso" for the Guardian here.

The Black Keys launch the first leg of their months-long North American tour with a performance at the U.S. Bank Arena in Cincinnati, Ohio, tonight, followed by shows in arenas like New York’s Madison Square Garden, Boston’s TD Garden, and Chicago’s United Center, with special guests Arctic Monkeys opening all along the way. In mid-April, the band headlines two weekends at the sold-out Coachella festival and heads out on the road again for the second leg of the North American tour.

Senegalese singer-songwriter Cheikh Lô will return to North America this April to play a series of venues and festivals featuring music from his critically acclaimed fifth album, Jamm. This will be the first opportunity for North American audiences to hear Lô performing songs from the album since its release in July 2011. The tour includes a performance at Carnegie Hall, sets at the New Orleans Jazz Fest and Louisiana International Festival, and shows in DC, St. Louis, Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill, Ithaca, and Montreal.

On the acclaimed Mermaid Avenue albums, Billy Bragg and Wilco put music to lyrics by folk legend Woody Guthrie for which he had not written music or made recordings. Tweedy and Bragg were "the perfect pair to conclude that Guthrie ... was a prophetic rock-and-roller with a whole lot to say," said the New York Times. On Record Store Day, April 21, Nonesuch will release Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions, which includes the original two volumes of Mermaid Avenue (the second re-mastered); a third volume with 17 previously unreleased recordings from those sessions; the 1999 documentary on the sessions, Man in the Sand; and a 48-page booklet with new liner notes by Nora Guthrie, lyrics, archival photographs, and facsimiles of lyric sheets and sketches by Woody Guthrie. Pre-orders include an exclusive print of Guthrie’s lyric sheet for “Hoodoo Voodoo.”

The new album pairing works by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki and the works they inspired by composer/guitarist Jonny Greenwood, due out on March 13, is featured on NPR's All Songs Considered. Producer Robin Hilton exclaims of Greenwood's 48 Responses to Polymporphia: "You hear that, and I think: everything created by a synthesizer is just so irrelevant and boring now. You hear something that real and organic and knowing that it could be performed live with these string instruments, I mean, that's amazing to me." The Guardian's Tom Service spoke with both composers about the project and says of that piece: "48 Responses isn't just a good piece for a composer who is more used to the studio, it is a dazzlingly imaginative, gripping and novel work, full stop."

John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer received its long-awaited London premiere by the English National Opera this past weekend. The production, led by conductor Baldur Brönniman and director Tom Morris has received tremendous attention in the British press. The Times gives the production a four-star review and calls the opera "a serious work of art" and the production "absorbing and provocative." The Guardian calls it “a major achievement,” in a four-star review, and an editorial in the same paper describes the opera as “a serious, beautiful and nuanced work that engages with one of the intractable tragedies of our era.” The Financial Times calls the piece "Adams at his best."

Carolina Chocolate Drops’ new album, Leaving Eden, is out today. Rolling Stone, in a four-star review, says that the album “grows handsome fruit from a nation's tangled roots,” calling the record “a lesson in 21st-century American folk.” The  Los Angeles Times notes that “band spends much of this very fresh-sounding album aligning itself with traditional values.” USA Today notes that the group “may take their cues from 1920s string- and jug-band music, but they're simply a great band.”

John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer, featuring a libretto by Alice Goodman, receives its London premiere in performances by the English National Opera starting this Saturday. Director Tom Morris (War Horse) makes his opera directing debut. Following the 1991 premiere of The Death of Klinghoffer, the New York Times said the work “transmutes contemporary history into operatic poetry.” Adams and Goodman recently spoke with BBC Radio 3's Music Matters about the opera and the controversy that surrounds it. Morris does so as well in a video you can watch here.