This holiday season, the Times-Picayune's Chris Waddington is happy to do without yet another mall-music listen to "Jingle Bell Rock." He's listening instead to Sérgio and Odair Assad's new album, Jardim Abandonado, and has added it to his list of gifts to give.

The managing editor of the Onion's A.V. Club, Josh Modell, recently caught a sneak preview of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, and while it's not the official A.V. Club review (look for that closer to the film's December 26 release), he had a few fine words on the movie: "[N]ot only did I see the best film of the year—in a walk—but maybe one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. This isn’t the official A.V. Club take ..., but I’d be surprised if any of our crack film reviewers will find it anything less than a masterpiece."

Best Movie of 2007. That's what Roger Friedman of foxnews.com is calling the Tim Burton–directed Sweeney Todd "... without a doubt." He's a longtime fan of the musical and has been a fan of the film from his first look at a critics screening. After last night's premiere, he can confirm that "Everything about it is just perfect ... There were a thousand wrong turns Burton and crew could have taken, but somehow they avoided them. They condensed a complicated three-hour show into a highly entertaining two hours without missing a beat."

Sérgio and Odair Assad recently stopped by the Soundcheck studios at WNYC, New York Public Radio, to perform works off their new album, Jardim Abandonado. New Yorkers can tune in to Soundcheck today at 2 PM EST on 93.9 FM to hear the live performances. 

The blogs are abuzz about last night's Sweeney Todd premiere at New York's Ziegfeld Theater, and if you weren't in midtown Manhattan to overhear what Johnny Depp or Tim Burton had to say on the red carpet, here's your chance to ask the film's star and its director a question. Tomorrow, December 5, AOL Moviefone is taking questions from fans for a chat with Depp and Burton as part of its UnScripted interview series. The questions and answers will be revealed on Wednesday, December 19, just one day after the film's soundtrack will be released on Nonesuch Records.

"Einstein on the Beach changed my life. Everything I thought musical theater was, abruptly wasn’t." So writes New York Times music critic Bernard Holland in yesterday's paper, previewing this Thursday's concert version of the seminal 1976 Philip Glass / Robert Wilson collaboration. The performance by the Philip Glass Ensemble, at Carnegie Hall, will be the first time it has been done live in 15 years.

The first night of her tour stop in Melbourne, Australia, isn't until April 22, but k.d. lang recently had a lot to report to the Melbourne Herald Sun about her new record, Watershed, and all the life changes that preceded it: "A change in me, a change in direction —emotionally—and a change in priorities,'' she told the Herald Sun. "I have changed a great deal since my 40th birthday ... It's a culmination of those things that led me to the album title.''

This past Friday, John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony received its world premiere at Stanford University, and, writes Los Angeles Times staff writer Mark Swed, the piece is "a chip off the old block." The composer wrote his original Chamber Symphony in 1992 while studying Schoenberg and overhearing the Carl Stalling–penned score coming from the Looney Tunes cartoons his son was watching in the other room, but the new piece, writes Swed, "is pure Adams."

Composer Peter Lieberson has been named a recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Neruda Songs, which he wrote for his late wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, before she passed away last year. Her November 2005 performance of the piece with James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra was recorded and released by Nonesuch Records. On today's episode of the Minnesota Public Radio show Performance Today, host Fred Child plays from the recording and speaks with the composer about the piece and the recognition it has received.

The schedule for the 2008 Gilmore Keyboard Festival has been released, and among the artists on the bill for the biannual event are Richard Goode, Audra McDonald, and the Brad Mehldau Trio. The Festival will be held April 24–May 13, in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

In a set of performances at Boston's Schubert Theatre last week, the Paul Taylor Dance Company delivered a "sharp, vibrant program," according to the Boston Globe, of two Taylor classics and two pieces receiving their Boston premieres, including Lines of Loss, set to Kronos Quartet's recording of Early Music (Lachryma Antiqua). Writes Thea Singer in her Globe review of the event, Lines of Loss could be seen as the 77-year-old choreographer's reflection on the passage of time, and so the music, fittingly, "weaves through the movement like a scratchy memory." With such a stirring piece, for Singer, the dance's "ending comes almost too soon."

As he wrote in his recent preview of Youssou N'Dour's performance with the Super Étoile band at LA's Royce Hall, the Los Angeles Times's Don Heckman was clearly looking forward to Saturday's show there. According to Heckman's concert review in today's Times, Youssou did not disappoint, and the crowd responded in kind, dancing in the aisles—"animated Terpsichores, arms and legs moving wildly in all direction"—despite the hall's restrictions against it. "The sheer vitality of N'Dour's music almost demands physical movement," he writes. And the give-and-take continued, with Youssou responding to the crowd's energy "by dialing up the already dynamic intensity of the music."