Christina Courtin's California concert schedule continues this week with performances in San Francisco and LA. Pop Matters describes the singer as "fearless, profound, and musically fascinating" and her "impressive" new album as "unlike anything else I have heard this year ... Lyrically precocious, and musically varied, Courtin presents herself as a chameleon, shifting through varied terrain from jazz to folk to country to pop and back again."

Richard Goode's Nonesuch recording of Beethoven's Complete Piano Concertos with Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra is out now. The New Yorker cites the "supple, measured lyricism" from Goode and his "sterling collaborators" on the album, finding both "the humane and poetic qualities" one has come to expect from the pianist and "truly revelatory playing" as well.

Wilco (the album) comes at a time when Wilco front man Jeff Tweedy is as content as he's been in years, and, says a Maxim magazine profile, that is a very good thing, resulting in the "most confident album of Wilco’s career ... a focused collection of poetic, emotionally direct songs that explore fear, loss, and love from a midlife perspective." Ultimately, "The triumph of Wilco (the album) ably rebuts the tortured-artist ideal."

For his most recent Nonesuch release, Disfarmer, Bill Frisell created a set of songs inspired by the images of photographer Michael Disfarmer. Frisell first set music to film 15 years ago with scores for three Buster Keaton movies. JamBase looks at these and Disfarmer, "one more remarkable piece of work that adds to the diversity and intrinsic curiosity that resides firmly in all of Frisell's music, a player for whom the whole expanse of sound is open and eagerly explored."

Christina Courtin's "Foreign Country," off her recent eponymous Nonesuch release, has been chosen as NPR's Song of the Day. "Courtin's self-titled debut is mercilessly charming," says NPR, "a conflation of sweet and sad that manages the neat (and difficult) trick of being endlessly effervescent without inducing tooth decay." The selected song is described as "twinkly, jaunty and blithe," one that "suggests an intriguing future for Courtin."

Wilco's set at the Troxy in London last night was the first of three sold-out shows with Blitzen Trapper in Britain and Ireland this week (and marked Jeff Tweedy's 42nd birthday). The Evening Standard gives the show four stars, praising "the quality of the tunes" from throughout the group's seven-album repertoire, Tweedy's "bittersweet vocal and the band’s brilliant musicianship."

"If you asked a room full of music critics to list the greatest American rock bands performing today, chances are a large majority of them would mention Wilco," says CBS Sunday Morning in its profile of the band. Rolling Stone's Austin Scaggs tells CBS that Wilco's "got it all ... great lyrics, great melody, great emotion," placing Jeff Tweedy among the "true songwriters," like Bob Dylan.

Allen Toussaint brought his inimitable style to both coasts of North America over the past few days, including sets in Boston, New York, and Vancouver. At Thursday's shows at Scullers in Boston, "the 71-year-old New Orleans icon used," says the Boston Herald, "the power of music to smother us Yankees in Big Easy love," including a "jaw-dropping" medley of tunes. "The audience ate it up."

"Disfarmer Theme," the opening track to Bill Frisell's Disfarmer, has been selected as Song of the Day by Jazz.com, rating a 96/100. "This opening track sets the stage for 25 more songs on a CD that is destined to be one of the defining moments in Frisell's career," says the site. "[He] may have found a sound palette from the past which also serves as a fresh beginning—an achievement all the more striking given this artist's own expansive personal legacy."

John Adams, the artist-in-residence for this year's Mostly Mozart festival at Lincoln Center, followed the highly successful three-night run conducting his opera A Flowering Tree—"one of the festival’s hottest tickets," according to the New York Times—by leading the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) in what the Times calls "vigorous, richly detailed performances" of three of his works at Alice Tully Hall Monday night.

John Adams's latest opera, A Flowering Tree, was given its New York premiere at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater last Thursday. New York magazine finds that "Adams is one of the few composers who can count on such well-executed premieres." The New York Times calls it an "enchanting, disturbing and musically intense opera," praising "the richness of the score." The Star-Ledger says the opera's "gifts were abundant" and it "contains some of the composer's most effective vocal writing." The Baltimore Sun says "the opera cast a remarkably strong spell."

After Gidon Kremer's performance of Philip Glass's Violin Concerto at the composer's BBC Proms debut last week, The Independent gave it a perfect five stars, saying "it worked like a beautifully oiled machine, and finally achieved a shimmering beauty." Kremer's recording of the complete Mozart Violin Concertos gets four stars from the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times, and the Sacramento Bee, which calls it a "standout ... [E]very detail of the music jumps out and delivers a winning combination sure to satisfy the Mozart aesthete and novice alike."