The Black Keys are in New York City this week to kick off the new year and the new season of NBC’s Saturday Night Live with host Jim Carrey. This appearance comes after a monumentally successful 2010 for the duo, which they closed out with three sold-out New Year's shows at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom. The Chicago Tribune says the band is an example of "how modern artists can earn mainstream success without sacrificing integrity," their live show exhibiting the "combination of persistence and persuasion that helped the band own 2010."

AfroCubism was featured on NPR's All Things Considered on Sunday. "The group features musicians from Cuba and Mali," says host Guy Raz, "and it's a kind of hybrid of the best sounds from these two musical traditions." Guest Betto Arcos of Global Village says "every song is just fantastic." AfroCubism makes the year's best lists in the Boston Globe, as does David Byrne/Fatboy Slim's Here Lies Love and The Black Keys' Brothers, which tops a Minneapolis Star Tribune list. The Star Tribune 's classical music critic lists Steve Reich's Double Sextet / 2x5 and Gidon Kremer's De Profundis. The Los Angeles Times picks Brad Mehldau's Highway Rider among the best in jazz.

Harps and Angels, the new musical featuring the music and lyrics of Randy Newman, officially opened at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles this week and runs through December 22. Variety calls the play "a sure cure for wintertime blues ... a showcase for his whiskey-soaked melodies and incisive poetic gifts." The Hollywood Reporter says: "All in all, it's a journey as simple, complex, contradictory and confounding as life itself—just what you'd expect from a fellow with the temperament of Huck Finn and the soul of a poet."

AfroCubism is currently on tour in Europe, where this group of Malian and Cuban greats played a sold-out show at the Barbican in London on Sunday. The Arts Desk called it "one of the most transporting and life-affirming gigs of the year." The Evening Standard gave it a perfect five stars, saying: "The musical links are real and there’s a clear physical delight in throwing round the exuberant solos." Band member Toumani Diabaté gave the BBC World Service a brief tutorial on the kora and how this traditional Malian instrument worked so well with the sounds of Cuba on AfroCubism.

Dawn Upshaw joined violinist Geoff Nutall for the European premiere of Kurtág's Kafka Fragments at the Barbican in London last week, directed by Peter Sellars. The Guardian gave it four stars, citing "Upshaw's emotional honesty and gripping presentation of music that tests a soprano's technique." She joins another Sellars collaborator, John Adams, in performances of Adams's El Niño with the San Francisco Symphony, led by the composer, in early December.

Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica chamber orchestra closed out their tour of North America with performances at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall in New York and Boston's Jordan Hall, featuring works from their latest Nonesuch release, De Profundis. The New York Times describes one such work as an "alluring, reflective piece." The Boston Globe says Kremer's performance "carries an electric charge precisely because the ear is almost always being led somewhere unexpected," and the Kremerata Baltica "play with great sensitivity."

Punch Brothers continue their US tour with stops outside DC, and in Charleston, West Virginia, for a live Mountain Stage performance. The Washington Post calls their music "dazzling." Last week, Steve Martin awarded banjoist Noam Pikelny the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass and performed with the band on The Late Show with David Letterman. Punch Brothers also performed at WFUV in New York. Watch videos of it all here.

Tune in to NPR's World Cafe today to hear Folds and Hornby discuss their new album, Lonely Avenue, and to hear Folds perform a few of its songs. Folds's US tour takes him to Buffalo tonight, where Artvoice says the unexpected collaboration behind Lonely Avenue is a success: "Folds flourishes on this album, and his curious choice to collaborate with an author, when Folds himself is recognized by fans for his words, is a trick that pays off." The duo is the subject of a new piece on the BBC News.

Brad Mehldau gave the New York premiere of his Highway Rider in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall Tuesday night, performing with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the musicians featured on the album. The New York Times says of all Mehldau's classically inspired works, Highway Rider "is his grandest effort yet," with its "ear-catching modal motif" and influences in Beethoven. At the same time, it remains "couched in jazz’s bluesy chromaticism and fluid rhythms." Highway Rider's European premiere is this Saturday at the Barbican in London.

The Malian and Cuban musicians behind AfroCubism close out their three-city tour of North America at The Town Hall in New York City tonight. The Times of London calls AfroCubism "an album of extraordinary cross-cultural musicianship." It was featured on NPR's All Things Considered, which sums up AfroCubism as "a summit of giants at play—their egos in check, their hearts open and the tangled history of two worlds flowing through their veins." The Wall Street Journal notes the album's "easy communion and some gorgeous details."

The musicians of the new album AfroCubism launch a three-city North American tour tonight in Montreal, then head to Boston and New York. The Boston Globe calls this "the most important world-music tour of the season" and describes the album as "thrilling and impeccably produced." The Wall Street Journal says it displays "the same kind of creative genre-mixing in world forms that we're accustomed to hearing in North American jazz." PRI's The World says "AfroCubism feels like something that's long overdue has finally arrived. Triumphantly." Alarm Press says "the album has an electrifying liveliness that stems not only from 15 years of pent-up collaborative energy but more than 100 years of crisscrossing cultural histories."

AfroCubism will be featured on today's edition of PRI's The World; Nick Gold, the album's producer, will discuss the project, some 14 years in the making. The Village Voice cites two early tracks on the album as "about as perfect a blend of AfroCubism's two dominant cultures as you'll ever find; the rest of the album sustains that high ... At long last, Gold and his cohorts have achieved something that lives up to its original promise, a direct link between the Old World and the new." All Music says: "a true musical meeting of minds between the two cultures."