Carolina Chocolate Drops kick off their December tour of the US South at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta tonight, followed by a two-night run at The Orange Peel in Asheville in their home state of North Carolina on Saturday and Sunday, with Bombadil joining all weekend. The celebratory seven-show tour celebrates and bids farewell to founding member Dom Flemons, who will go on to start his solo career. The concerts continue with a pair of performances at the Bijou Theatre in Knoxville and conclude with a two-night run at the Neighborhood Theatre in Charlotte.

Led by co-founder Rhiannon Giddens, the band will tour throughout 2014 with Hubby Jenkins and two new musicians, cellist Malcolm Parson and multi-instrumentalist Rowan Corbett, who will join the group in the New Year. Flemons will kick off 2014 with a tour of Australia, and continue performing across the US throughout the year.

Rhiannon Giddens’ show-stopping performance at the T Bone Burnett and Joel and Ethan Coen–produced Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of "Inside Llewyn Davis" concert this fall at New York’s famed Town Hall will be broadcast on Showtime beginning next Friday, December 13.

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Speaking of Inside Llewyn Davis, the new film written and directed by Academy Award winners Joel and Ethan Coen and produced by Scott Rudin and Joel and Ethan Coen, opens in select theaters in New York City and Los Angeles today. The film, which follows a week in the life of a young folk singer as he navigates the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961, stars Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, and Justin Timberlake. The soundtrack, released on Nonesuch Records last month, features 12 new recordings, as well as a never-before-released recording of Bob Dylan performing his song “Farewell."

To find out where Inside Llewyn Davis is playing and order tickets, visit insidellewyndavis.com.

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The BBC Philharmonic led by conductor Juanjo Mena performs John Adams’s Slonimsky’s Earbox at The Bridgewater Hall in Manchester tonight; meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Florida Orchestra offers a three-night run of concerts featuring Adams’s Chamber Symphony at the Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg tonight and on Saturday, and Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater on Sunday.

Further down state, Alarm Will Sound’s co-founder and conductor Alan Pierson leads eight blackbird and musicians from the New World Symphony in a program at the New World Center in Miami Saturdy, featuring Adams’s Guide to Strange Placesand Steve Reich’s Double Sextet. The ensemble eighth blackbird commissioned Double Sextet, which earned Reich the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2009, and recorded the piece for Nonesuch in 2010.

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Bombino concludes his 14-city North American fall tour at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in New York City tonight, as part of Carnegie’s Late Nights series. The Tuareg guitarist, whose Dan Auerbach–produced Nonesuch debut album, Nomad, is featured on Rolling Stone’s list of the 50 Best Albums of 2013, launches an Australian festival tour at the end of the month. The New York Times recommends tonight's show, citing that "firebrand" album.

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Shawn Colvin offers two solo sets in Oregon this weekend: at the McDonald Theatre in Eugene tonight and the Rogue Theatre in Grants Pass on Saturday. She continues the Pacific Northwest leg of her tour at the Bing Crosby Theater in Spokane, Washington, on Sunday, before heading to Seattle and Vancouver next week.

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Jeremy Denk joins the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and conductor Robert Spano to perform the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 25 at Music Hall in Cincinnati this morning and Saturday night. Also on the program are two pieces by Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and Symphony No. 2, A London Symphony. Reviewing a recent performance of the same Concerto No. 25, the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote that Denk’s “star shone in the Mozart.”

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Richard Goode closes out his three-night residency with the New York Philharmonic and conductor David Zinman at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall in New York City tonight and on Saturday. On the program is Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 18, Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony No. 3, and Tomas Adès’s Three Studies from Couperin.

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Kronos Quartet celebrates its 40th birthday with a performance at University of California’s Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley on Saturday, as part of the group's season-long residency with Cal Performances. The eclectic program includes the Bay Area premiere of Philip Glass’s Orion: China and Terry Riley’s Another Secret eQuation; Aheym by Bryce Dessner, who joins the Quartet for the performance; and George Crumb’s Black Angels, the piece that inspired the founding of Kronos 40 years ago. The concert also features special guests Wu Man, the Pacific Boychoir, the Young Women’s Chorus of San Francisco, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), among others.

This weekend’s performance is part of Kronos’s 40th-anniversary season, which is the subject of feature articles in both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News. “That's four decades of tireless performing and recording, adding more than 800 new works to the string quartet repertoire, and generally making the world rethink what chamber music is and can be,” writes the Chronicle’s Joshua Kosman.

“[I]t's hard to imagine another group or arts organization that has come close to expanding repertory to the extent that Kronos has,” writes the Mercury News’s Richard Scheinin “Even beyond those new works, its impact is vast in the performing arts world: in the use of live electronics, sound design and theatrical lighting—conceiving of a night in the concert hall as a coherent experience, one that follows an arc, telling a story using all the technological smarts of the age.”

Steve Reich tells Scheinin: "Kronos has opened up the door to reinventing the string quartet in the 20th and 21st centuries." Read more at mercurynews.com.