Carnegie Hall has announced its 2020–21 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 Rhiannon Giddens, who is a Perspectives artist for the season, John Adams, Chris Thile, Caroline Shaw, and Kronos Quartet.

As a Perspectives artist, Rhiannon Giddens will curate and perform in four concerts throughout the season, starting with two performances in the intimate space of Weill Recital Hall on Friday, October 23, 2020, at 6:30pm and 9:30pm, for which Giddens is joined by Francesco Turrisi. On the program, titled When I Am Laid in Earth, the two conservatory-trained musicians reinvent the voice-and-piano recital with an aim to removing the boundaries between classical and vernacular music. Drawing on diverse sources—including American and Italian folk music, early Baroque songs, classical arrangements of African American spirituals, original songs, and deconstructed opera arias—the program showcases the fluidity between the classical and popular sound.

Giddens and Turrisi bring music from their critically acclaimed 2019 Nonesuch album, there is no Other, to Zankel Hall, joined by bassist Jason Sypher, on Thursday, January 14, 2021. The album is at once a condemnation of “othering” and a celebration of the spread of ideas, connectivity, and shared experience. "This is acoustic roots music at its most glorious," exclaims Uncut, "and Giddens is fast becoming the genre’s brightest star in the firmament."

Giddens is in Stern Auditorium on Friday, March 12, this time with Our Native Daughters, the group of fellow banjo players with whom she released the album Songs of Our Native Daughters. Drawing on sources from the 17th through 19th centuries, the group reimagines the past and creates new stories for our time.

For the culminating concert of her Carnegie Hall curatorship, Giddens is joined by Turrisi and friends back in Zankel Hall for a program titled Mr. Bones Need to Leave Me Alone on Friday, April 23. On this program, they explore the African American roots of minstrelsy, its complicated cross-cultural beginnings, its theatrical development and distortion by white musicians in blackface, and its impact on contemporary music. Giddens looks to reclaim minstrelsy and set it in its place as great early American music.

Earlier in the season—in fact, on Opening Night—John Adams's Tromba Lontana will be the very first piece performed this season, opening a gala concert by Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel in Stern Auditorium on Wednesday, October 7, 2020. Three days later, Adams himself will conduct the LA Phil New Music Group in a program curated by Andrew Norman in Zankel Hall, on Saturday, October 10.

Chris Thile, who held Carnegie Hall's Debs Composer's Chair in 2018–19, reunites with his fellow bandmates from the 2011 album The Goat Rodeo Sessions—cellist Yo-Yo Ma, bassist Edgar Meyer, and fiddler Stuart Duncan—as well as vocalist Aoife O’Donovan for Not our First Goat Rodeo in Stern Auditorium on Tuesday, October 27, 2020. Thile, Ma, and Meyer had collaborated on a Bach Trios album for Nonesuch in 2017, and O'Donovan joined Thile as a guest vocalist on his 2017 solo album, Thanks for Listening. Chris Thile brings his public radio show Live From Here to Stern Auditorium for a live broadcast on Saturday, February 6, 2021.

Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Caroline Shaw gathers a number of musician friends for the New York premiere of a new work of hers in Zankel Hall on Wednesday, January 13. Ars Nova Copenhagen will perform the new choral work, and Shaw will perform with her acoustic band The Hands Free. Shaw's new album, Orange, just earned the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for Attacca Quartet.

Kronos Quartet, whose recording of Terry Riley's Sun Rings just won the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Classical, and who performed in Zankel Hall this past Saturday, returns to the venue on Friday, March 19, to perform George Crumb's Black Angels, the piece that inspired Kronos's founding, along with new works by Aleksandra Vrebalov and Vladimir Martynov.

Additionally, the 2020–21 Carnegie Hall concert season brings Stern Auditorium performances by Gidon Kremer on October 23 and Youssou N'Dour with his band Super Étoile de Dakar on March 20; a new work by Tyondai Braxton given its New York premiere by Third Coast Percussion in Zankel Hall on January 9; and Steve Reich's Different Trains (which Kronos performed in Zankel last weekend) played by Decode in Weill Recital Hall on March 24.

For more on these and other performances in Carnegie Hall's 2020–21 season, visit carnegiehall.org.