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."

Last Wednesday, Nonesuch Records' production coordinator, Ronen Givony, was listening to an eclectic set of music—piano pieces by Haydn and Messiaen, some electronic tunes, new music for laptop and strings. Not an unlikely mix off the iPod shuffle here at the office. But for this particular listening, Ronen was at a concert at the Good-Shepherd Faith Church on Manhattan's Upper West Side for the much rarer thrill of attending a concert he had produced himself. It was the latest event in the successful series he created last year called Wordless Music.

We can now bring you the complete track list from the album The Wire: “... and all the pieces matter." The deluxe, 35-track disc includes several versions of the show's opening theme song, Tom Waits’s “Way Down in the Hole,” along with tracks from the Baltimore club- and hip-hop scene that have never before been on a major-label release. Also included is some of the most memorable dialog from the program’s five years. We're also pleased to announce that a separate album, Beyond Hamsterdam: Baltimore Tracks from The Wire, showcasing only tracks by Baltimore musicians, will be released simultaneously.

You've seen the trailer. You've watched the behind-the-scenes footage in the recording studio. You've read what the critics had to say. Now you can hear for yourself what all the talk has been about: Nonesuch Radio is now playing Johnny's performance of the pivotal song "My Friends" off the Sweeney Todd film soundtrack, which will be available from Nonesuch December 18. To hear the track, click on the Nonesuch Radio icon at the top left of this page.