Wilco plays Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit Concert ... Kronos Quartet gives John Adams piece its Swedish premiere ... Laurie Anderson speaks at UC Berkeley colloquium ... Sérgio and Odair Assad continue college tour with the Turtle Island Quartet ... David Byrne brings his "mind-blowing, booty-shaking music" to the Midwest ... Shawn Colvin performs there as well ... Bill Frisell's Trio is in Brazil ... k.d. lang plays the Ryman ... The Magnetic Fields close out their fall tour of "dizzyingly catchy songs" ... Brad Mehldau and Joshua Redman play Europe together and with their trios ... Randy Newman finishes his North American tour ... Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's Steve Reich Evening comes to Brooklyn ... Dawn Upshaw repeats "transfixing" performance in St. Paul ... and more ...

Before Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile take the stage at the University of Chicago's Mandel Hall tonight, the pair can be heard live on WFDU-FM's Lonesome Pine RFD this morning. The Washington Post says the duo's self-titled Nonesuch debut "represents the most substantial music Thile has recorded, for the give-and-take between the high-pitched mandolin and the deeply resounding bass is full of dark drama and rigorous musical architecture." The Kansas City Star says "the duo's world-class musicianship" along with "the highly intuitive communication that exists in the music itself ... provide the album's 12 compositions with heart, humor, precision and warmth."

Isabel Bayrakdarian's tour with songs celebrating Armenia's national composer featured on her recent Nonesuch debut, Gomidas Songs, came to a close earlier this week. Audiophile Audition says the songs on the album are "rendered to perfection by the wonderful Isabel Bayrakdarian ... fabulous, tuneful, bittersweet, and hopeful ..." The review concludes: "[T]his album soars to one of the top song albums of the year, heartily and urgently recommended to all."

Brad Mehldau takes a night away from his Trio tour to play a special duo set with label mate Joshua Redman tomorrow night at the Christuskirche in Mannheim, Germany. The Financial Times, in its review of the Trio's recent show at London's Barbican, says of Brad: "Mehldau creates gently undulating soundscapes of gradually gathering intensity. Starting with the simplest of motifs, he develops an intricate tapestry of melodic details, chordal voicings and dense cross-rhythms." The Guardian calls the Trio's concert take on Sufjan Stevens' "Holland" "a lambent, implausibly lovely improvisation."

Nonesuch Records is happy to announce the signing of singer/songwriter Christina Courtin, a young New York City–based musician with a classical pedigree in violin and a devoted following in New York built over the last several years playing in clubs all over town. Her label debut was recorded this year in New York and Los Angeles with a stellar cast of musicians and will be released in early 2009. "It isn’t hard to decode the allure of this burgeoning local artist," writes Time Out New York. "Her songs are at once old-fashioned, classic pop … and garnished with strange instrumental trimmings. Onstage, she lunges into her music with a spasmodic fearlessness that most vocalists reserve for the shower."

The recently released Buena Vista Social Club at Carnegie Hall documents the group of stellar Cuban musicians' unforgettable concert at the storied hall a decade ago. Rolling Stone gives the album 4.5 out of 5 stars, exclaiming: "That show, captured on this two-disc set, is even more emotionally engaging than the group's eponymous album, which triggered a worldwide Latin-jazz revival." The New York Times calls the concert "the emotional climax" of the Wim Wenders documentary about the group, crediting soloists Rubén González, Compay Segundo, and Ibrahim Ferrer: "Heard here, they sound enlivened, elated and a bit amazed, and the feeling is contagious."

Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer bring their tour of the States to a close next Wednesday at Carnegie Hall. Nonesuch released their eponymous debut duo disc last month, along with a special deluxe edition that also includes a DVD full of concert performances and behind-the-scene footage. Audiophile Audition gives it five stars, concluding: "When you combine these two musicians, you get magic. Of course, it’s magic that explodes out of any boundaries that you might want to impose on them ... In a word, it’s wonderful."

Brad Mehldau has kicked off the European leg of his fall tour with his Trio, whose performance earlier this week at London's Barbican earned four stars from both The Times (UK) and The Guardian. "From the opening left-hand phrases of Brad Mehldau's 'Dream Sketch,' there wasn't a finger out of place in two hours of music-making," reports The Times. "This was a trio whose members were in perfect accord with one another ... [and] demonstrated a level of telepathic co-operation rare not only in jazz, but music of any sort." Metro concurs, adding: "The Brad Mehldau Trio is the quintessential modern piano outfit."

The closing concert of Isabel Bayrakdarian's North American tour celebrating the music of Armenian composer Gomidas Vartabed was held in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall on Monday. It featured songs from the soprano's Nonesuch debut, Gomidas Songs, which the New York Times calls "irresistible." In the recital, says the Times, she "playfully gamboled through childlike melodies, her voice warm and sunny; in the laments her plaintive tone cut to the heart. She made sinuously winding melismatic passages seem effortless."

Sam Phillips will be back on the road next week for a short series of dates on the West Coast with songs from her latest Nonesuch release, Don't Do Anything, and from throughout her career. Earlier this week, Acoustic Cafe broadcast a recent live performance, which you can hear online now. Last week, NPR named the title track off the new album its Song of the Day and suggests that when "Phillips sings about the moments that move her heart, [i]t's to her credit that you don't quite know whether it's full to bursting or long since broken."

John Adams's 2005 opera Doctor Atomic received its Met premiere last week. The opera tells the story of the creation of the atomic bomb and the man behind it, J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York magazine says that "Adams has written his finest work" with this "darkly riveting" opera and its "score of microscopic clarity and panoramic sweep." The Star-Ledger praises conductor Alan Gilbert, who "led a performance of precision and expressiveness, bringing the score's harmonic piquancy, metrical complexity, and textural detail together as a visceral rush." The Washington Post says one of the opera's "moments of rich beauty" is the duet between Oppenheimer and his wife, in which "the score is so purely gorgeous it could make you cry."

Randy's West Coast tour landed in California this weekend, leading the Santa Barbara Independent to pronounce that "even missing game seven of the Boston vs. Tampa Bay series last Sunday night in order to witness Newman in action was well worth it," naming him "truly a great American storyteller." No Depression echoes that remark, calling hims "as distinctive a songwriter as popular music has produced," and stating that his latest release, Harps and Angels, "not only recalls the best music Newman has ever made, it equals it."