John Adams conducts the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra at the orchestra's hometown venue, Heinz Hall, in a program that includes his 2003 piece for electric violin and orchestra, The Dharma at Big Sur, tonight and Sunday afternoon. Violinist Leila Josefowicz is featured as guest soloist and describes Dharma to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review as "a piece about good will ... [It] takes you to a different place, with total strength vs. vulnerability at the same time." Adams also leads the orchestra in performances of Sibelius's Sixth Symphony and interludes from Britten's Peter Grimes. Adams is the Pittsburgh Symphony's 2008–09 Composer of the Year.

The English National Opera production of Adams's Doctor Atomic, starring Gerald Finley as J. Robert Oppenheimer and directed by Penny Woolcock, continues with tonight's performance at London's Coliseum.

Joyride, choreographer Mark Morris's recent work set to Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony, is part of San Francisco Ballet's current all-Morris program at the War Memorial Opera House. The company will perform the program tonight and Sunday afternoon. Son of Chamber Symphony will be given its Spanish premiere tomorrow night in a performance by the ensemble BCN 216, at Barcelona's L'Auditori, as part of the venue's New Sounds festival.

In other Adams dance news, Germany’s Stadttheater Giessen Ballett gives the second performance of choreographer Tarek Assam’s Feiningers Fugen, set to Adams’s Violin Concerto, as well as to works by Bach and Glenn Gould, at the Stadttheater Giessen on Sunday. The piece was premiered there at the end of last month.

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Afro-Cuban All Stars take their tour of the US through the Midwest for the next couple of weeks. This weekend, it's the Overture Center in Madison, Wisconsin, tonight; Reif Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Saturday; and Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Sunday.

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Laurie Anderson is a featured artist in the Guggenheim Museum's current exhibit The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, which examines the influences of Asian culture on American artists. In addition to the inclusion of her work in the exhibit, the museum presents a set of live performances by Laurie titled Transitory Life: Some Stories. This new collection of stories, poems, and music drawn from her work debuted last night in the Guggenheim's theater, with an encore performance there tonight.

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Dan Auerbach closes out his US tour with Hacienda and Those Darlins in shows at each end of California this weekend: tonight at Bimbo's in San Francisco and Saturday night at El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles. In an interview with Dan for the Los Angeles Times, writer Scott T. Sterling says that with his new, debut solo album, Keep It Hid, "Auerbach has expanded on the template, creating an album that explores the outer reaches of classic rock and vintage blues." LA Weekly agrees that it "reveals other, subtler musical personas that he had, indeed, previously kept hidden."

Keep It Hid is featured on today's Very Short List, which describes Dan as "the kind of roots-rocker who keeps his roots covered in dirt, and his first solo album is as grimy as it is virtuosic." VSL says the new record sees Dan tackle "Southern soul, ramshackle psychedelia, and straight-up folk songs. His frayed, swooning voice and swampy guitar solos were made for rock radio ..."

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David Byrne, recently named one of the 50 most creative people by Creativity magazine, kicked off the European leg of his Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno tour in Hamburg, Germany, earlier this week. He'll play in Frankfurt tonight, at the Alte Oper, before heading to Scandinavia early next week.

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The start of Toumani Diabaté's US tour, which was due to take place last night at Cincinnati's MusicNow festival, has been pushed back a week due to unforeseen family medical concerns. The tour's organizers are working to reschedule the MusicNow performance, as well as this weekend's scheduled dates at McCabe's in Santa Monica and Largo in Los Angeles. Toumani now plans to begin the tour with his duo residency with Béla Fleck at Yoshi's Jazz Club in Oakland, California, Thursday, March 19.

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Bill Frisell begins a weeklong tour of the American South with frequent collaborator Greg Leisz, starting Sunday with the first of two nights at the Continental in Austin, Texas. Leisz, a master of the pedal steel guitar, is featured on a number of tracks from Frisell's recently released Nonesuch retrospective The Best of Bill Frisell, Volume 1: Folk Songs.

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Philip Glass begins a series of concerts, titled Philip Glass & Friends, at one of downtown New York's newest hot spots, City Winery, this Sunday. For this weekend's preliminary event, he'll be joined by a frequent collaborator, cellist Wendy Sutter. Concerts continue for the following three Sundays as well.

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Richard Goode joins the Boston Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Herbert Blomstedt, for a series of four concerts this week at Boston's Symphony Hall, beginning last night, with encore performances this afternoon at 1:30 PM, Saturday night, and Tuesday night. On the program are Nielson's Helios Overture; Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 18 in B-flat, K. 456; and Brahms's Fourth Symphony. Evening performances include a pre-concert talk by Professor Gregory Slowik, Director of Musical Activities at Simmons College.

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Kronos Quartet, after headlining the MusicNow festival in Cincinnati, Ohio, with two concerts in that city's Memorial Hall, heads to Rotterdam, Netherlands, this weekend for the RedSound Festival. On the program are several Dutch premieres and a complete performance of Steve Reich's Triple Quartet, which the composer wrote for Kronos in 1998.

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The Brad Mehldau Trio has beat the late-winter blues in the northern hemisphere with a tour of Australia that moves north with the arrival of spring. After last night's performance at The Basement in Sydney, they'll close things out Down Under with a performance at the Garden of Unearthly Delights in Adelaide's Rundle Park for the East End Jazz Festival tonight. On Sunday, they'll have made their way to Singapore for a show at that city's Concert Hall as part of the Mosaic Music Festival.

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The Broadway powerhouse duo Mandy Patinkin and Patti LuPone continue their extensive US tour with a series of concerts at the DuPont Theatre in Wilmington, Delaware. They'll play two evening sets tonight and Saturday night and two matinee concerts Saturday and Sunday. For the current tour, featuring choreography by Ann Reinking, the pair are sharing the stage together for the first time since their Tony Award–winning lead roles in Evita 25 years ago.

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Joshua Redman and one of two trios off his recent album, Compass—bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Greg Hutchinson—continue their European tour with a performance at the Konserhuset in Stockholm, Sweden, tonight and at Stadtcasino in Basel, Switzerland, Sunday. After another Swiss gig, in Bern, on Monday, the group will head to the UK to set up residency at Ronnie Scott's in London at the end of the week.

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As mentioned yesterday in the Nonesuch Journal, Steve Reich is the featured composer in this weekend's cycle of the Salzburg Biennale, a new festival for contemporary music. Events began last night with a performance by Rosas of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's Fase, featuring Reich's Piano Phase, Violin Phase, Come Out, and Clapping Music; there will be an encore performance tonight. Also tonight, the Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik will perform a concert of Reich's Different Trains and Sextet.

On Saturday, members of Synergy Ensemble will perform Reich's Drumming at the Biennale, with Ictus Ensemble, while other members of the vocal group join the Askö & Schoenberg Ensembles for a performance of the piece at the Kunsthal Auditorium in Rotterdam, Netherlands, as part of an all-Reich program for the RedSound Festival; also on the latter program is his Music for 18 Musicians.

To complete the circle, Music for 18 Musicians will be performed by the Synergy members in Salzburg with the Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik in a Sunday morning concert. Also on that program are Reich's Clapping Music, performed with the composer, and his City Life.