Iron and Wine, aka Sam Beam, covers a lot of ground this weekend, performing in three different states: the Firefly Music Festival’s Coffee House stage in Dover, Delaware, tonight; the Smith Opera House in Geneva, New York, on Saturday; and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams on Sunday. Special guests The Secret Sisters give opening sets along the way. Iron and Wine returns to New York state and rounds out the Northeast leg of the tour in Rhode Island and New Hampshire in the days ahead. Featured on the tour are songs from Iron and Wine’s Nonesuch debut album, Ghost on Ghost—which the New York Daily News recently claims “smartly refigures a forgotten strain of ’70s pop”—and more.

In advance of last night’s performance in Charlottesville, Virginia (not too far from his alma mater, VCU, in Richmond), Beam spoke to C-Ville Weekly about his band mates, his developing career, and his songwriting process: “I approach songs more like poems. I stick with visual imagery that a reader can respond to and then dabble in some emotion. But at the end of the day, it is a song. You start with the melody and then start daydreaming.” Read the full interview at c-ville.com.

---

As noted earlier today in the Nonesuch Journal, The Black Keys launch their European festival tour with two sets in Germany this weekend: down at the Southside Festival in Neuhausen Ob Eck tonight and up north at the “sister” Hurricane Festival in Eichenring in Scheeßel on Sunday. The Keys perform on each sold-out festival’s Green Stage.

---

Louis Andriessen’s 1976 work Hoketus is the penultimate piece performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars and friends at the Winter Garden in New York City on Sunday, as part of the 2014 Ban on a Can Marathon. It is performed in honor of the Dutch composer’s 75th birthday this month. Andriessen’s Grawemeyer Award–winning La Commedia was just released on Nonesuch Records, as a set with two CDs and a DVD.

---

Alarm Will Sound, led by artistic director and conductor Alan Pierson, premieres the new site-specific opera I Was here I Was I at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City tonight. The new music theater work by composer Kate Soper and director/librettist Nigel Maister takes place in the famed Temple of Dendur. The opera’s immersive story was inspired by the writing of Victorian adventurer and Egyptologist Amelia Edwards and follows the Temple of Dendur’s history from 19th-century Egypt and ancient Nubia to present-day New York City.

Tonight’s premiere marks the final performance of the 20-member ensemble’s season-long residency at the Museum, which included the New York premiere of Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite.

---

Jeremy Denk, the Music Director for last weekend’s Ojai Music Festival, takes highlights from the program up the Californian coast to the Ojai North Music Festival, which got underway in Hertz Hall at Berkeley last night and continues through Saturday. The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts), with libretto by Denk and music by Steven Stucky, received its Bay Area premiere last night and is given an encore performance tonight. Based on pianist and scholar Charles Rosen's 1971 book The Classical Style, the opera is “a mash-up of Glenn Gould at his most satirical, PDQ Bach at his sauciest and a distractedly erudite Rosen cooking up a French sauce while pontificating on harmonic structure in his kitchen,” according to the Los Angeles Times, reviewing the opera’s world premiere in Ojai last weekend. “Stucky’s resourceful score and Denk’s droll text produce an ingeniously eloquent musing on the meaning of life.” Once again, The Knights orchestra and Brooklyn Rider string quartet perform the piece, led by Robert Spano. There is a pre-concert talk outside of Hertz Hall with the creative team—Denk, Stucky, and director Mary Birnbaum—moderated by Cal Performances’ Artistic and Executive Director Matías Tarnopolsky.

On Saturday morning, Denk performs selections of Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path interspersed with short pieces by Schubert, followed by the Uri Caine Ensemble performing Caine’s Mahler Re-Imagined; Denk then joins the Ojai Festival Singers and The Knights to offer an evening concert of the Ligeti études (featured on his Nonesuch debut album, Ligeti/Beethoven) and works by Ives and Beethoven.

Timo Andres joins The Knights to perform his re-composition of Mozart’s “Coronation” Concerto—heard on his 2013 Nonesuch album, Home Stretch—as well as pieces by Ives, Feldman, Stockhausen, and Weill, on Saturday afternoon. He joins Denk and Caine for a pre-concert discussion moderated by Tarnopolsky.

---

Bombino, whose Dan Auerbach-produced album, Nomad, was released last year, performs the penultimate set of the Festival Festate in the Town Hall Square of Chiasso, Switzerland, on Saturday. The Tuareg guitarist and his band round out their brief tour of Europe in Croatia, Slovenia, and Portugal before kicking off a string of dates in North America on June 29.

---

Carolina Chocolate Drops continue their months-long summer tour of the US in the Virginias this weekend: at the Blue Ridge Music Center’s outdoor amphitheater in Galax, Virginia, tonight and Appalachian Power Park in Charleston, West Virginia, on Saturday, as part of FestivALT. They next head to California to kick off a string of performances out West.

“There were showcases for the jaw-dropping individual talents of everyone in the newly re-configured quartet,” writes the Nashville Scene about the Chocolate Drops’ set at Bonnaroo last weekend. “[Rhiannon] Giddens’ vocal on their Odetta-inspired version of ‘Water Boy’ showed an incredible command of every emotion encapsulated in the song—frustration, hope, resolve, despair—and raised our hackles from 200 yards away.”

---

Dr. John performs a headline set at Bayou Boogaloo in Norfolk, Virginia, on Saturday. On the Budweiser Main Stage, he offers selections from his Dan Auerbach-produced Nonesuch debut album, Locked Down, and songs from throughout his storied career.

---

Emmylou Harris joins Rodney Crowell to perform a double bill with Merle Haggard at the Chateau Ste. Michelle’s Amphitheatre in Seattle on Sunday. The duo performs selections from their Grammy Award-winning duets album, Old Yellow Moon, released last year on Nonesuch Records, as well as songs from their respective catalogs. Reviewing Harris’s recent performance at Red Butte Garden, the Salt Lake Tribune notes that she “doesn’t just sing a song, she tells a story.”

---

Pat Metheny Unity Group—featuring Chris Potter, Antonio Sanchez, Ben Williams, and Giulio Carmassi—performs a set at the San Marino Jazz Festival at Cava degli Umbri in San Marino on Saturday, bookended by two dates in Italy: at Teatroteam in Bari tonight and Teatro del Vittoriale in Gardone Riviera on Sunday. The Unity Group, supporting its debut album, Kin (←→),, rounds out the tour of Europe with dates in France and Spain through the end of the month, before kicking off the second US leg of its world tour in California on July 16.

Reviewing the band’s performance at the Hammersmith Apollo in London last week, the Financial Times says, “The smouldering solos and showcases of the original [Unity Band] quartet remained, but the multilayered textures of Giulio Carmassi’s keyboards and occasional bits of orchestrion gave Metheny’s themes and structures a symphonic dimension.” The Guardian writes that the Unity Group’s “fluent and diverse set was flawless.”

---

Robert Plant and his Sensational Space Shifters band continue their European tour at Stadtpark in Hamburg tonight and Le Bataclan in Paris on Sunday. They continue with performances in France, Germany, and Ireland, and round out the month at the Glastonbury Festival in the UK. Nonesuch Records will release the legendary British singer/songwriter’s label debut later this year.

---

Punch Brothers perform at the 41st annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Telluride, Colorado, which got under way yesterday with performances from Chris Thile and Nickel Creek, and continues through the weekend. The sold-out festival features outdoor performances on the Main Stage as well as the more intimate Workshops at Elks Park and the indoor NightGrass series for when the sun finally goes down, all timed to coincide with the summer solstice and set amidst panoramic views of the picturesque San Juan Mountains and Telluride Box Canyon.

Punch Brothers hit the Main Stage Saturday afternoon before closing out the whole festival with a NightGrass show at the Sheridan Opera House Sunday night. Guitarist Chris Eldridge joins fellow guitarist Bryan Sutton for a set at Elks Park today; Sara and Sean Watkins are there Saturday morning; and bassist Noam Pikelney with fiddler Stuart Duncan, and Sara Watkins as part of a songwriters’ workshop, both on Sunday. The Telluride festival holds a special place in Punch Brothers lore as the site where band mates Chris Thile and Noam Pikelny first met back in 2005.

---

Steve Reich joins the Nonsense Soloist Vocal Ensemble and Uruguayan Perceum Percussion Ensemble to perform his seminal Music for 18 Musicians at Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires on Sunday, as part of Colón Contemporáneo.

This fall, Reich performs with Philip Glass at Nonesuch Records’ 50th anniversary festivities at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), which presents Nonesuch Records at BAM: Celebrating a Label Without Labels, a wide-ranging series of concerts, September 9–28, in New York City. Tickets are on sale now at bam.org.