The McGarrigle Christmas Hour brought more than a little holiday cheer and flair to Carnegie Hall's hallowed Stern Auditorium on Wednesday night. It was a family affair, with Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Kate's children Rufus and Martha Wainwright, their aunt Sloan Wainwright, and many other extended family members by marriage, birth, and longtime friendships, including Emmylou Harris, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Justin Bond, and Jimmy Fallon. The New York Times writes: "Although the program still includes the kind of pristine, ancient-sounding French carols performed by the sisters that used to dominate the show, the younger city folk have added a new flavor."

Nonesuch Records wishes Elliott Carter a very happy 100th birthday today. Birthday concerts are being held across the globe tonight, in New York, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Helsinki, Vienna, Montreal, and Washington, DC. Among the highlights are the Ensemble Intercontemporain's concert at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank Centre, featuring Pierre-Laurent Aimard, with Pierre Boulez conducting. In New York, the celebration is at Carnegie Hall, with pianist Daniel Barenboim and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, led by James Levine, in a program the Boston Globe called, after its recent Boston premiere, "easily the best Boston Symphony Orchestra concert of the season." An editorial in The Guardian concludes: "As we salute Carter this week, we are hailing a composer who has always been his own man, and whose music is some of the most remarkable and enduring of our time."

Revolutionary Road has been nominated for four Golden Globe awards. The Sam Mendes–directed film adaptation of the landmark novel by Richard Yates is up for Best Motion Picture, Drama; Best Director for Mendes; Best Actor, Drama, Leonardo DiCaprio; and Best Actress, Drama, Kate Winslet. Nonesuch will release the film's soundtrack on December 23, with original music by Thomas Newman, plus three songs from the film’s era by The Ravens, The Orioles, and The Ink Spots. Also nominated for a Golden Globe, for Best Motion Picture Made for Television, is A Raisin in the Sun, starring Audra McDonald, Sean Combs, and Phylicia Rashad.

With the holiday season bringing with it so many family traditions, one of the more welcome over the past few years has been The McGarrigle Christmas Hour, a concert at Carnegie Hall inspired by the repertoire of Kate and Anna McGarrigle's 2005 Nonesuch album of the same name. The album is a collection of traditional and contemporary holiday songs and a celebration of family and friends, featuring Emmylou Harris, Anna’s daughter Lilly Lanken, and Kate’s children Martha and Rufus Wainwright, all of whom will perform at tonight's show. Also included among the concert's special guests are Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Teddy Thompson, Linda Thompson, Jimmy Fallon, and Justin Bond.

"Si Naani," the opening track to Toumani Diabaté's 2008 Grammy-nominated album, The Mandé Variations, earns a 95/100 from Jazz.com, which concludes: "This moving 10-minute track, and indeed the whole CD, will leave you anything but restless tonight. This release is an important contribution to Diabaté's oeuvre and is one of the most important recordings of traditional African music in recent memory."

The reissue of the groundbreaking Nonesuch Explorer Series titles from Japan is now complete, with the recent addition of two more titles. The Independent exclaims, "It's wonderful that Nonesuch is reissuing the 92-LP Explorer Series, which put ethnomusicology on the map in the Seventies," and says of the recently reissued Koto Classics: "[I]t's wonderful to hear once more koto master Shinichi Yuize in his prime ... and these classic pieces display [the koto's] suggestive power to the full."

The year that began with the final season of HBO's The Wire and the Nonesuch release of the series' only soundtracks—"... and all the pieces matter": Five Years of Music from "The Wire" and Beyond Hamsterdam: Baltimore Tracks from "The Wire"—now comes to a close with the release of the complete five seasons in a single, 23-DVD box set: "a handsome, thorough and well-appointed cap to the show’s amazing run," says Paste magazine, for what "was the best show on television ... It was—is—a monument."

Mandy Patinkin begins a two-week residency at Manhattan's Public Theater tonight in honor of the 20th anniversary of his first concert at the esteemed New York City venue. Accompanied by pianist Paul Ford, Mandy will alternate among three different programs, beginning tonight with Dress Casual, featuring music by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Harry Chapin, and others; Celebrating Sondheim, a journey through the music and lyrics of the legendary composer; and Mamaloshen, an exploration of traditional, classic, and contemporary songs sung entirely in Yiddish.

Kronos Quartet's performance in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall on Friday night featured a number of first performances: three New York premieres, including that of Glenn Kotche's Anomaly, and three world premieres. Also on the program was the piece that first launched the group in 1973: George Crumb's Black Angels. The New York Times says, for Kronos, it was "a springboard for an extraordinary career of boundary-breaking discovery and innovation." Friday night's "vivid, powerfully realized staging" added still more to the power of the piece, at one point eliciting "a collective gasp" from the audience.

Following his sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall with Kronos Quartet on Friday night, Glenn Kotche joined his Wilco bandmates for a sold-out show of their own at the Auditorium Theater in Rochester, New York. It was their first-ever performance in the city, leading Rochester Democrat and Chronicle to exclaim: "It was worth the wait ... as spectacular a show as we've seen this year."

k.d. lang returns to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno this evening to perform a song from her latest Nonesuch release, Watershed. Also scheduled to appear on tonight's episode are actor Will Smith and Food Network celebrity chef Paula Deen. Coincidentally, Smith recently made Barbara Walters's list of the year's "most fascinating people," a distinction inaugurated in 1993 by, among others, k.d. lang.

Glenn Kotche and Kronos Quartet premiere Kotche piece at Carnegie Hall; Kronos continues with a Family Concert ... Dawn Upshaw is at Carnegie to perform Golijov's Ainadamar with Orchestra of St. Luke's ... Adams's A Flowering Tree gets its Japanese premiere ... David Byrne continues his musical "outpouring of joy" (Hartford Courant) in Connecticut and Tennessee ... Brad Mehldau plays two nights in Paris ... Mandy Patinkin keynotes SightLife's fall fundraiser and preps for two-week residency at New York's Public Theater ... Reich's Electric Counterpoint gets a xylosynth perfromance in England ... Wilco is on the road with Neil Young ... and more ...