Punch Brothers, who kicked off a three-week US tour earlier this month, return to the Savannah Music Festival in Savannah, Georgia, for the third time since 2009, performing a sold-out set at the Trustees Theater Saturday night. Earlier in the day, Chris Thile joins fellow mandolinist Mike Marshall for a sold-out festival set at the Charles H. Morris Center. Following the Punch Brothers tour, guitarist Chris Eldridge returns to the festival to perform with three fellow guitar virtuosos on April 1, and banjoist Noam Pikelny and friends are showcased alongside Becca Stevens Band on April 2. “Each band member … is wildly talented on his own,” wrote the Oberlin Review about the Punch Brothers’ recent residency at Oberlin College, “and the chemistry between the five only accentuates their individual skill.”

The band performs in the South all weekend: at the Suwannee Springfest in Like Oak, Florida, tonight and the Clay Center in Charleston, West Virginia, on Sunday; singer/songwriter Aoife O’Donovan supports throughout. The tour, featuring music from the band's Nonesuch albums and more, continues through the end of the month with shows in Indiana, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and upstate New York. Punch Brothers will also perform at the High Sierra and Sasquatch! festivals in the Pacific Northwest in July.

Also performing at the Savannah Music Festival, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, are Fatoumata Diawara and Bombino, who close out the penultimate night of the festival on April 4.

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John Adams’s 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer receives the second of two performances at the Long Beach Opera at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach this Saturday afternoon. The opera, with libretto by Alice Goodman, addresses the 1985 terrorist hijacking of the Achille Lauro ocean liner. 

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Timo Andres performs his new piece, Work Songs, for his Twin Cities debut in the Music Room at the SPCO Center in St. Paul, Minneapolis, tonight and Saturday. The new song cycle, which received its world premiere at Kaufman Music Center’s Merkin Hall in New York City on Wednesday, was written especially for fellow composers and multi-instrumentalists Gabriel Kahane, Ted Hearne, Becca Stevens, and Nathan Koci, who perform it in the concert. A multi-movement work inspired by old-fashioned American parlor songs, these “work songs” are set to texts having to do with facets of professions, jobs, and labor. The arrangements are tailored to the performers, with three singers, two guitars, keyboards, accordion, and piano. The program, part of SPCO’s Liquid Music Series, will also include individual work by each of the other composers in the collective, all arranged for the quintet to perform together.

"Timo Andres is a fastidious generator of beauty,” writes the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in a feature profile on the composer previewing this weekend’s events. Writer Britt Robson notes “the seamless grace and organization of Andres’ music, which can glide into gorgeous crescendos and blend tradition and unpredictable refinement in a manner that feels both alert and grounded.” Andres was also the subject of the latest episode of Q2 Spaces, a video series from the online new-music station Q2, which you can watch here.

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Shawn Colvin kicked off a two-week duo tour with fellow Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Steve Earle earlier this week. The tour, titled “Songs and Stories, Together Onstage,” continues at the Hilbert Circle Theatre in Indianapolis on Saturday and Symphony Hall in Atlanta on Sunday. These two longtime friends and mutual admirers share music from their extensive catalogues as well as some of their favorite songs by other classic songwriters , sharing the stage for duets, storytelling, song swapping, and guitar playing. The tour winds its way back up to Nashville and Richmond before heading to the Northeast; a new set of dates out West have just been announced for May.

“I am always looking to share a stage with people who are fun,” Colvin told the Miami Herald about touring with Earle. “We will be concentrating on our own music, but also telling stories about other artists and their music, so the conversations need to come together organically.”

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Emmylou Harris performs at the Mansfield Theater in Great Falls, Montana, tonight, giving the first-ever concert to benefit the C.M. Russell Museum of American Western art.

Harris launches an international tour with Daniel Lanois, along with Jim Wilson on guitar and Steven Nistor on drums, on April 3, to celebrate the reissue of Harris’s groundbreaking, Lanois-produced album Wrecking Ball, due out in April on Nonesuch Records. The new three-disc set features the remastered original album, a bonus CD of previously unreleased material, and a DVD of the documentary Building the Wrecking Ball.

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Kronos Quartet “has led and continues to lead what surely must be the longest unending revolution by any ensemble ever in music history,” writes the Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed following the group’s two 40th anniversary concerts at UCLA last weekend. The revolution continues with a performance at Duke University’s Baldwin Auditorium in Durham, North Carolina, on Saturday, the culminating concert of a three-day residency. On the program are works by Laurie Anderson, Jerry Garcia, Geeshie Wiley, and Wagner, as well as pieces written for Kronos by Philip Glass, Missy Mazzoli, and Bryce Dessner. Also on the bill 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. Kronos founder David Harrington offers a public conversation with writer and North Carolina Symphony Scholar-in-Residence Will Robin at the University’s Alizarin Gallery tonight.

In addition to A Thousand Thoughts, Nonesuch celebrates the group’s 40th anniversary year with a five-CD box set Kronos Explorer Series that comprises five classic albums from five different parts of the world. Both will be available on April 8. Kronos also performs Clint Mansell’s score to Darren Aronofsky’s new film Noah, out in theaters next week; the soundtrack will be released on Nonesuch Records on Tuesday.

The day before, Q2 Music presents Kronos at 40: A 24-Hour Marathon Anniversary Stream, starting Monday morning at 12:01 AM. Hosted by Phil Kline, the marathon comprises 24 distinct hours of Kronos recordings; unreleased studio tracks; audio tributes from composers and collaborators like Steve Reich, Wu Man, and Donnacha Dennehy; commentary and anecdotes from all four members of the quartet; and, finally, a live performance at The Green Space in New York at 7:30PM. Tune in all day at wqxr.org.

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Natalie Merchant joins the New Jersey Symphony Chamber Orchestra for a performance at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, New Jersey, on Saturday. Along with new works, the show features favorites from throughout Merchant’s storied career, including selections from her 2010 Nonesuch debut album, Leave Your Sleep.

Nonesuch Records will release Merchant’s new self-titled album on May 6. The recording—available for pre-order in the Nonesuch Store—is the multi-platinum singer’s sixth solo collection, and her first of entirely original songs in 13 years.

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Pat Metheny Unity Group continues its US tour at the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, Maryland, tonight; the Keswick Theatre in Glenside, Pennsylvania, on Saturday; and the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey, on Sunday. The North American leg of the world tour continues in the Northeast through the end of the month; the European leg kicks off in late April.

The Buffalo News, reviewing its recently released debut album, Kin (←→),says the group’s sound “deftly balances strictly composed motifs and harmonies against the highest level of improvisation and ensemble interplay.”

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Joshua Redman Quartet—pianist Aaron Goldberg, bassist Reuben Rogers, and drummer Gregory Hutchinson—closes out its tour of Europe at the International Bergamo Jazz Festival in Bergamo, Italy, tonight. The band kicks off a brief US tour with a special performance at with the Brad Mehldau Trio at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles on April 2.

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Sara Watkins and her brother Sean perform at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara, California, tonight, taking their monthly LA musical residency, Watkins Family Hour, on the road for the first time.

Next month, the Watkins join their Nickel Creek bandmate Chris Thile for the start of a reunion tour, featuring music from their upcoming Nonesuch release, A Dotted Line, due out April 1 and now available for pre-order in the Nonesuch Store with an instant download of three tracks from the album: “Destination,” “Love of Mine,” and “21st of May.”