The Super Bowl has arrived in New York and New Jersey, and The Black Keys are in town to help kick off the weekend-long festivities surrounding Sunday’s big game. The band plays a sold-out show at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City tonight, as part of a city-wide concert series celebrating Super Bowl XLVIII. Fans of both the Seahawks and Broncos and others, of course, are welcome.

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Composer John Adams leads three nights of concerts at Jones Hall in Houston, Texas, tonight, Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon, titled Adams Conducts Adams, in which he conducts the Houston Symphony Orchestra and saxophonist Timothy McAllister in a performance of his symphonic piece City Noir. Also on the program are Copland’s El Salon Mexico and Korngold’s Violin Concerto (featuring Gil Shaham on violin), as well as a pre-concert discussion led by McAllister.

Timothy McAllister’s performance of City Noir with the St. Louis Symphony, recorded last February at Powell Hall in St. Louis, will be released by Nonesuch Records at a future date. The album will also feature a recording of Adams’s new Saxophone Concerto, which was written for McAllister, whom Adams describes as “a fearless musician and risk taker,” not least for the “fiendishly difficult” alto sax solo part in City Noir.

The St. Louis Symphony's last release with Nonesuch in 2009 included John Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony and was named “Classical Album of the Decade” by the Times of London. Coincidentally, that piece will be performed by the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra at the Richard Adam Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic, tonight.

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Shawn Colvin launches her week-long tour of the UK with the Transatlantic Sessions at the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow tonight and on Sunday, taking place at the Sessions’ live performance home, the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. This marks her debut on the Transatlantic Sessions—a series of collaborative performances by Scottish, Irish, and US folk musicians—which continues its tour in London, Liverpool, Gateshead, Birmingham, and Manchester.

Colvin returns to the US in late February, and, as previously noted in the Nonesuch Journal, will join fellow singer-songwriter Steve Earle for a special run of tour dates in March.

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Fatoumata Diawara continues the Canadian leg of her North American winter tour in Ontario this weekend: at the Aeolian Hall in London tonight; the Royal Conservatory’s Koerner Hall in Toronto on Saturday, with a supporting set by fellow Malian musician Bassekou Kouyaté; and Hamilton Place’s Molson Canadian Studio in Hamilton on Sunday, kicking off the Roots en Route Festival. She heads next to Quebec, before bringing the music of her Nonesuch debut album, Fatou, to the US on February 7.

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Carolina Chocolate Drops, after launching their nationwide tour at the Charleston Music Hall in South Carolina last night, perform at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts’ Ferguson Hall in Tampa, Florida, on Saturday. Singer Rhiannon Giddens strums an old minstrel-style banjo alongside Hubby Jenkins and new bandmates Malcolm Parson and Rowan Corbett. The tour, featuring music from their latest Nonesuch album, Leaving Eden, and much more continues across the Southeast through March, and then up into the Northeast starting in the spring. 

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Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, fresh off a win for Best Americana Album for their duets album Old Yellow Moon at last weekend’s Grammy Awards, resume their tour of the US at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center in North Charleston, South Carolina, tonight, and the University of North Carolina’s Kenan Auditorium in Wilmington on Saturday. Last weekend’s Grammy Award win marks the 13th Grammy of Harris’s career.

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Iron and Wine, after kicking off the 2014 tour calendar at KUTX First Birthday in Austin last weekend, continues with three benefit sets in the US Midwest this weekend. First up, with co-headliner Neko Case, is the 37th annual Ann Arbor Folk Festival at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor tonight, to raise funds for the famed folk venue The Ark. On Saturday, Sam Beam offers two intimate solo performances at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago with special guests The Haden Triplets, to support the school, which presents dance, theater, and visual arts courses to people of all ages.

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Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica chamber orchestra continue their six-city US tour with a performance at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on Sunday, as a part of the Benjamin Britten centenary celebration. The program includes Weinberg’s Concertino for Violin and Strings, Britten’s Variation on a Theme of Frank Bridge, and two pieces by Britten contemporary Shostakovich: his Violin Sonata and his satiric opera Anti-formalist Gallery, featuring bass Alexie Mochalov, who joins the orchestra throughout the US tour, including upcoming concerts in Houston, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and St. Paul.

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Audra McDonald performs a sold-out show at the Library of Congress’s Coolidge Auditorium in Washington, DC, on Saturday, rescheduled from October 10 due to the government shutdown. To showcase the Library’s American musical theater collection, the intimate evening will feature music by Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim, and Michael John LaChiusa, among others. McDonald’s newest solo release, Go Back Home, features songs by Sondheim, LaChiusa, and other composers with whom she has long been associated and some relatively new to her repertoire.

In celebration of Valentine’s Day, McDonald and her husband, Will Swenson, star in a reading of Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis at the Public Theater on February 10, as part of the Public Theater’s Drama Club series.