Carnegie Hall has announced its 2015–16 concert season, and featured among the performers taking the esteemed hall's stages are a number of artists familiar to readers of the Nonesuch Journal, including Brad Mehldau, Ry Cooder, Kronos Quartet, Timo Andres, Jeremy Denk, and Audra McDonald, as well as the New York premiere of a new work by John Adams.

Pianist Brad Mehldau opens Carnegie Hall's Off the Beaten Track series in Zankel Hall on Thursday, October 22, 2015, with the world premiere of his Three Pieces for Piano After Bach, a new work co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall.

Ry Cooder, whose performance with Buena Vista Social Club at Carnegie Hall in 1998 became the climax of the acclaimed Wim Wenders documentary Buena Vista Social Club, returns to the Hall on Saturday, November 14, for a rare pairing with multi-instrumentalist Ricky Skaggs and vocalist Sharon White and an evening of blues, gospel, and bluegrass in Zankel Hall. Also performing are Joachim Cooder on drums and Mark Fain on bass. The concert, hosted by Rosanne Cash, is part of her Carnegie Hall Perspectives series.

Kronos Quartet is the holder of the Richard and Barbara Debs Creative Chair at Carnegie Hall for the 2015–16 season. As recently noted in the Nonesuch Journal, Carnegie Hall is a lead partner in Kronos Quartet's Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, which will commission 50 new works devoted to the most recent approaches to the string quartet, designed for the training of students and emerging professionals. The works will be commissioned from an eclectic group of composers, including label mate Rhiannon Giddens.

On Saturday, April 2, 2016, as part of the Fast Forward series, Kronos Quartet gives a performance showcasing a new work from the Fifty for the Future project as well as the US premiere of music by Swedish composer Karin Rehnqvist and the New York premiere of a new work by Malian balafon player Fodé Lassana Diabaté. Also in April, Kronos will conduct a workshop for string quartets culminating in a concert by the young artists in the workshop at Zankel Hall on Friday, April 15.

Also that week in Zankel Hall, pianist-composer Timo Andres is joined by fellow composer-performer Gabriel Kahane for a program of songs, four-hand piano music, and premieres of their own works, on Thursday, April 7. Bach’s sacred music, viewed through Hungarian composer György Kurtág's four-hand piano arrangements, frames this concert, part of the Signatures series.

And rounding out these April events is a solo recital from pianist Jeremy Denk in Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium on Sunday, April 17. The afternoon concert is part of the Keyboard Virtuosos II series.

Audra McDonald, an Artistic Trustee of Carnegie Hall, returns to Stern Auditorium for a very special performance celebrating Carnegie's 125th anniversary. This one-night-only event on Thursday, May 5, 2016, also includes performances from fellow Trustees Martina Arroyo, Emanuel Ax, Renée Fleming, Marilyn Horne, Lang Lang, Yo-Yo Ma, Jessye Norman, and James Taylor.

Additionally, Carnegie Hall's 2015–16 brings the New York premiere of John Adams's Second Quartet by the St. Lawrence String Quartet, on a program with works by Haydn and Beethoven, on Thursday, October 29, 2015, as part of the Chamber Sessions I series, and a performance of the composer's 1995 work Road Movies by violinist Leila Josefowicz and pianist John Novacek on Tuesday, November 10, as part of the Off the Beaten Track series, both in Zankel Hall. The St. Lawrence performs on the first recording of Adams's First Quartet, released on Nonesuch in 2011, and Josefowicz performs on the first recording of Road Movies, released on Nonesuch in 2004.

For more information on these and other performances in Carnegie Hall's 2015–2016 season, visit carnegiehall.org.