Brad Mehldau and Joshua Redman kick off a two-and-a-half-week tour of duo performances in Burlington, Vermont, tonight. At one recent duo date, "the twosome played with an unerring touch," says the Albany Times Union. All About Jazz insists that anyone with "the opportunity to see these two jazz masters should not pass it up." Mehldau spoke with PBS NewsHour about his new album, Highway Rider, which also features Redman.

Philip Glass is being honored at the Danspace Project Gala tonight in New York City. The organization is celebrating Glass for what it describes as "his significant contributions to American dance and his major impact on international art and culture." Laurie Anderson will give introductory remarks. Now in its 35th season, Danspace aims to offer choreographers a nurturing environment in which to develop and show challenging new works.

The recent Louis Andriessen-curated concerts at Carnegie Hall show the composer to have "an undiminished capacity for making mischief," says The New Yorker's Alex Ross. Ross looks at other contemporary composers creating outside "a stylistic party line," and calls Timothy Andres’s forthcoming Nonesuch debut, Shy and Mighty, "the kind of sprawling, brazen work that a young composer should write," achieving "an unhurried grandeur that has rarely been felt in American music since John Adams came on the scene."

The celebrations of Stephen Sondheim's 80th birthday continue with tonight's New York City Center Gala honoring the composer, featuring the stars of A Little Night Music—just nominated for three Outer Critics Circle Awards—along with a host of performers who, collectively, have appeared in over 75 Sondheim shows. John Doyle directs. The benefit will help fund New York City Center’s artistic and education programs and Young Playwrights Inc.

Natalie Merchant's Leave Your Sleep was released last week to a number of milestones, including the No. 17 slot on the Billboard pop chart and No. 1 on the folk chart. Merchant continues to tour this weekend, including a live-audience taping of NPR's eTown. Utah's The Spectrum calls the album "a rich collection of music and poetry," on which "there's not a bad apple ... For an album this big that's quite an accomplishment." The Cleveland Scene recommends the complete album, declaring it "well worth the investment."

Tune in to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to catch Natalie Merchant perform the song "Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience" off her new album, Leave Your Sleep, tonight on NBC. She is in Los Angeles for two sold-out shows on her current US tour. There's an interview with Merchant in MusicOMH, which calls Leave Your Sleep "a phenomenally ambitious and creative project." The St. Petersburg Times calls it "fun, educating and enlightening."

The world has been celebrating Stephen Sondheim's recent 80th birthday in style all month and will continue to do so with upcoming events at New York City Center and Ravinia. Today, NPR's Fresh Air celebrates by talking with the composer about his great body of work, his musical influences, his writing process, and much more.

Homeland, Laurie Anderson's first studio album in ten years, is due out on Nonesuch June 15 and is now available for pre-order at nonesuch.com. In a Nonesuch Store exclusive, the first 250 orders of Homeland include a limited-edition 12" vinyl single of the album track "Only an Expert," signed by Anderson. She recently spoke with the BBC World Service program The Strand, which calls her "one of the great artistic experimenters."

Natalie Merchant and her recently released Nonesuch debut, Leave Your Sleep, were the subject of a feature article in the Sunday New York Times. Merchant spoke with Times writer Jon Pareles about the project and all that went into making it. The Boston Herald gives the album an A, calling it "a contender for 2010’s best album." The Financial Times gives it five stars. The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and the Brisbane Times all give four stars to this "staggeringly elaborate project."

Sara Watkins will join Garrison Keillor and the cast of public radio's A Prairie Home Companion on a coast-to-coast concert tour this August and September that will take on the everlasting theme of romantic love, fittingly dubbed the Summer Love Tour. The tour kicks off August 10 at the Interlochen Arts Festival and runs through a mid-September closer in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Armenian-Canadian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian's Nonesuch debut album, Gomidas Songs, has been nominated for a Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year: Vocal or Choral Performance. The Junos, Canada's music award, will be presented in a ceremony this Sunday in St. John's, Newfoundland, and will be broadcast on CTV.