Nonesuch Records is happy to announce that the new album by The Magnetic Fields, Distortion, will be released on January 15, 2008. The band will perform a small
number of US tour dates in February and March. Specific details regarding venues and ticket pre-sales will be announced shortly.

MSN has announced its list of the upcoming holiday season's must-see movies, and both Sweeney Todd and There Will Be Blood are among the top ten. "Combine Stephen Sondheim's Tony Award-winning musical of a revenge-seeking barber, Tim Burton's distinctive vision, the charisma of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Sacha Baron Cohen, and you're up for one hell of a bloody (literally) ride," says MSN of Sweeney. And Jonny Greenwood's There Will Be Blood score is a powerful player in that film.

On Friday night, London's Barbican Centre celebrated John Adams's 60th birthday in style. For the occasion, Adams conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a program featuring his own Choruses from The Death of Klinghoffer. BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting the concert on today's Performance on 3 program and will continue to stream the performance online for the next seven days.

Stephin Merritt has joined Rufus Wainwright, Imogen Heap, Brian Eno, and others in contributing tracks to Plague Songs, a UK compilation that pays homage, in song, to the Biblical plagues. He's written a little ditty about lice, or more precisely, "The Meaning of Lice," and Pitchfork says: "Only one man could successfully write and record a wistful, feel-good, disco-danceable, three-minute ode to parasites and pestilence—with a chorus that includes the word 'subcutaneous'—and that man is Stephin Merritt."

Tomorrow night, Itzhak Perlman joins members of the Perlman Music Program for gifted young musicians in concert at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Included on the program is Steve Reich's Triple Quartet, along with Mozart's G Minor Quintet for Viola and Strings and Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence. Nonesuch released the world premiere recording of the Reich piece, performed by Kronos Quartet, in 2001.

Boston Now joins the critical mass in praising this week's kick-off of the Sweeney Todd national tour at Boston's Colonial Theatre, saying "It works gloriously." Entertainment Editor John Black offers high praise indeed when he writes: "On a night when it seemed that the entire city was staying at home to watch the Red Sox in the World Series, a few lucky thousand were seated at the Colonial Theatre watching a thrilling tale of revenge, romance, murder, and meat pies." Citing the recent Tony-winning Broadway production, Black writes, "The play obviously has a pedigree. Thirty minutes into the show at the Colonial, you will know why."

The first national tour of John Doyle's Tony Award–winning Sweeney Todd reinvention kicked off at Boston's Colonial Theatre on Tuesday night, to rave reviews. The Boston Globe says the production "reveals Stephen Sondheim's dark brilliance in all its cold-blooded glory. It is marvelous and terrible to behold." Sweeney Todd will play in Boston through November 4, when it will travel to Toronto, then on to more than a dozen cities across the US

Time Out New York, in honor of its special ticket issue, asks readers to send in pictures of their most prized ticket stubs from those unforgettable moments in life—"from the first baseball game you attended with your dad to that magical performance by Patti LuPone in Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd." A prize will go to the ticket with the most compelling backstory out there.

On November 14 in New York City, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will present An Evening with Tim Burton, featuring a conversation with the director and a sneak peek at clips from his film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. The special event will also include clips from a number of films from throughout Burton's illustrious 35-year career, including some from his previous five collaborations with Depp. But the evening's highlight will surely be the "first look" at scenes from Sweeney, which doesn't hit theaters until December.