Kronos Quartet, continuing its 40th anniversary concert season, performs two nights at UCLA’s Royce Hall in Los Angeles tonight and on Saturday, giving the Los Angeles premieres of two pieces by composers familiar to readers of the Nonesuch Journal: Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson.

On tonight’s eclectic program is the Los Angeles premiere of Philip Glass’s Orion with frequent Kronos collaborator Wu Man, and works by Krzysztof Penderecki and Wagner, along with the world premiere of Views from Here to the Heavens (for Scott Fraser) by Wilco guitarist Nels Cline (who joins the Quartet for the performance) and John Oswald’s Spectre, both written for Kronos. Also on the program is Alter Yechiel Karniol’s Sim Sholom, off the forthcoming Kronos album A Thousand Thoughts; the track is available to download now with pre-orders of the album in the Nonesuch Store. The second half of tonight’s concert comprises George Crumb’s Black Angels, the piece that inspired Kronos founder David Harrington to form the group.

On Saturday, the Quartet joins labelmate Laurie Anderson for the Los Angeles premiere of the evening-length work Landfall, written by Anderson for Kronos. “Eager and apposite collaborators,” wrote the New York Times’s Steve Smith in a review of the piece, “both are fascinated by language, whether literal or compositional, and concerned with situating music within broader artistic and cultural contexts.”

In addition to the aforementioned A Thousand Thoughts, which looks at the group's geographically wide-ranging sources, Nonesuch Records will release the five-CD box set Kronos Explorer Series: five classic albums from five different parts of the world—Pieces of Africa, Night Prayers, Caravan, Nuevo, and Floodplain—with new liner notes that include an in-depth interview of Harrington by renowned author Jonathan Cott.. Both will be available on April 8, with an international release to follow on April 21, and are available to pre-order in the Nonesuch Store.

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John Adams’s 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer receives its Southern California premiere in performances by the Long Beach Opera at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach this Sunday and the following Saturday. The opera, with libretto by Alice Goodman, addresses the 1985 terrorist hijacking of the Achille Lauro ocean liner. The Los Angeles Times, previewing the Long Beach premiere, spoke with Adams about the opera for a feature article available at latimes.com. The Death of Klinghoffer will receive its Metropolitan Opera premiere in New York City this fall.

The night before the premiere, Adams and Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director Gustavo Dudamel sit down with New York Times reporter Michael Cooper for a TimesTalks conversation at The TimesCenter in New York City on Saturday. The conversation will be webcast live at new.livestream.com.

Across the Atlantic, Michael Tilson Thomas leads the San Francisco Symphony and St. Lawrence String Quartet in two performances of Adams’s 2012 piece Absolute Jest: at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall tonight and the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London on Saturday. “We’re composers, we’re scavengers,” Adams tells The Independent about finding musical inspiration for the piece in the late Beethoven scherzos. “Beethoven was a scavenger, Bach too–that’s one of the joys of being creative. Stravinsky is rumoured to have said that ‘a good composer borrows, a great composer steals.’ That may be apocryphal. But it’s not without truth.” 

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Also at the Southbank Centre, singer-songwriter Olivia Chaney joins pedal steel guitarist BJ Cole for a performance at Queen Elizabeth Hall tonight, as part of a diverse the 35th-anniversary celebration of fRoots magazine. The event—entitled Bridges—features first-time collaborations that span cultures, generations, and genres. Chaney, who was featured on the cover of fRoots magazine last summer, is due to release her Nonesuch debut album later this year.

On May 18, Chaney will join fellow Nonesuch artists Kronos Quartet, Natalie Merchant, Rhiannon Giddens, and Sam Amidon on the other side of the Thames, for a unique concert of traditional and contemporary music collaborations at Milton Court Concert Hall. This sold-out event is part of the Barbican’s marathon weekend entitled Explorations: The Sound of Nonesuch Records, a celebration of Nonesuch Records to mark the label’s 50thanniversary.

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Richard Goode offers a solo piano recital at the University of Miami’s Maurice Gusman Hall in Coral Gables, Florida, on Sunday, as a part of the Sunday Afternoons of Music series. On the program are selection from Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path, Schubert’s Sonata No. 20 in A Major, D. 959–which Goode recorded for Nonesuch over 35 years ago—and Debussy's Préludes (Book 1). Goode offers a free master class at the University’s Clarke Recital Hall on Saturday morning.

“Goode was full-toned, spontaneous, almost hearty at times,” writes the Financial Times about his recent performance of the Debussy Préludes in London. “Puck let fly a rude sense of humour, the girl with the flaxen hair moved with an enticing playfulness, and the minstrels played with abandon, as if they really were enjoying the music.” Read the full review at ft.com.

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Brad Mehldau and his Trio continue their European tour at Carré Belle-Feuille in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, tonight, and the Teatro Principal in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on Sunday. They continue their tour of the continent through next week and launch a tour of North America on April Fool’s Day.

“You won’t hear one [duo] more daring than the jaw-dropping, genre-defying pairing of keyboard king Mehldau and pugilistic post-bop drummer Guiliana,” writes the Winnipeg Sun about Mehliana, Mehldau’s electric duo with Mark Guiliana, which recently released its debut album, Mehliana: Taming the Dragon, on Nonesuch. The vinyl edition, due out on Tuesday, includes two 140-gram LPs pressed at Pallas MFG in Diepholz, Germany, and a CD of the album.

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Pat Metheny Unity Group rounds out its tour of the US Midwest this weekend: at The Palladium in Carmel, Indiana, tonight; Lawrence University’s Memorial Chapel in Appleton, Wisconsin, on Saturday; and the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Sunday. The Unity Group —which released its debut album, Kin (←→), last month on Nonesuch—heads north of the border for one show in Toronto before returning to the States to tour the Northeast. p>

Earlier this week, Metheny was featured on Here & Now from NPR member station WBUR to discuss the new album. You can hear what he has to say at hereandnow.wbur.org.

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Randy Newman, following two shows in Colorado earlier this week, performs one last set in the Centennial State at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen on Saturday. As recently announced on The Tonight Show and noted in the Nonesuch Journal, Newman will lead a one-night-only performance of his famed 1995 musical Faust in concert at New York City Center on July 1, as part of the Encores! Off-Center series. The performance will feature Newman starring as the Devil. Tickets go on sale to the general public on Monday.

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Joshua Redman Quartet—pianist Aaron Goldberg, bassist Reuben Rogers, and drummer Gregory Hutchinson—continues its European tour in France at La Comète in Chalons en Champagne tonight, and at L’Astrada in Marciac on Saturday. The Quartet performs in two more French cities before concluding its month-long tour with three dates Italy.