Kronos Quartet performs two concerts at the University of Notre Dame's Leighton Concert Hall for its Visiting Artist Series: debuting tonight with an encore performance Saturday night. Featured on the program is the world premiere of Terry Riley's Transylvanian Horn Courtship, with the composer in attendance, along with selections from Steve Reich's The Cave, Hamza El Din's Escalay (Water Wheel), Franghiz Ali-Zadeh's Oasis, and other works by composers from around the world. Kronos had a number of new instruments made for the Riley premiere. "These instruments are going to look different from other bowed, stringed instruments because they’re related to what’s called the trumpet violins or Stroh instruments, in that they have a brass bell that comes out from the bridge,” says violinist David Harrington. “It was an early way to make an almost electrified instrument but was totally acoustic so that it ends up sounding quite a bit like a trumpet. Cello becomes tuba, viola akin to trombone."

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John Adams's music remains at the center of the Graz Opera Ballet's performances of choreographer Darrel Toulon's Swan Trilogy, which continue at the Opera House in Graz, Austria, tonight and Saturday night. The kernel of the piece, which premiered in February, is Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, from which springs Sibelius's Swan of Tuonela and more. Featured in the performance are a number of Adams works: The Dharma at Big Sur, Gnarly Buttons, Road Movies, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and Tromba Lontana.

Another dance piece that premiered in February and set to Adams's music, Tarek Assam’s Feiningers Fugen, will be performed by Germany’s Stadttheater Giessen Ballett at the Stadttheater's Großes Haus Saturday night. The work is set to Adams’s Violin Concerto, as well as to works by Bach and Glenn Gould.

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Afro-Cuban All Stars are out on Long Island, New York, tonight for a show at the Tilles Center in Brookville. They'll head into the city tomorrow night for a show at New York's Town Hall. The Village Voice says that, for the Afro-Cuban All Stars, bandleader Juan de Marcos Gonzalez has "gathered 15 of the world's best Cuban expat musicians for what should be a thrillingly autentico survey of the colorful panorama of Cuban music, from religious batumbata beats through contemporary timba jams." On Sunday, the show moves up north for a night at the Zeiterion Theatre in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

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Laurie Anderson will be presenting an award in music composition at the Cinema Eye Honors, an award for documentary filmmakers, at the Times Center in New York City.

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David Byrne has arrived in the UK for a tour of Britain and Ireland with Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno. The pair, says the Daily Telegraph's Richard Grant, "opened up a new genre of music with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. A sound collage of spiky funk rhythms, weird electronic noises and recorded snippets of American radio preachers, Arabic singers and chanters, an exorcist and other 'found vocals', as Byrne and Eno called them at the time, Bush of Ghosts helped usher in the era of sampling and loops." There's also an extensive preview of the concerts in The Guardian. The tour is at Colston Hall in Bristol tonight and Symphony Hall in Birmingham on Sunday.

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Shawn Colvin performs a solo set at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House in Denver, Colorado, for that city's third annual RootsFest (formerly known as the Denver Folk & Roots Music Festival) on Saturday.

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Christina Courtin plays violin behind that legendary chanteuse Marianne Faithfull in two sets at New York's City Winery tonight and Saturday night. Christina will also back Faithfull for her appearance on Late Night with David Letterman next week.

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Kora virtuoso Toumani Diabaté began his US tour in a handful of duo dates with banjo master Béla Fleck at Yoshi's in Oakland, California, last weekend, after which JamBase's Jim Welte wrote that Toumani "is one of those musicians who have to be seen to be believed." Of his kora playing, Welte writes: "In his mighty hands, the instrument was a small symphony unto itself ... More than most instrumental music, you could almost hear the stories emanating from the notes themselves. This was music that made words superfluous." The two are now on tour with a larger cast of musicians for Fleck's Africa Project, which is at the Ridgefield Playhouse in Ridgefield, Connecticut, tonight; the RPI Concert Hall in Troy, New York, on Saturday; and The Music Hall in Tarrytown, New York, on Sunday. Cantelowes, from Toumani's 2008 solo album, The Mandé Variations, was picked as a Top Tune on Santa Monica's KCRW yesterday.

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Philip Glass performs the third concert in his Philip Glass & Friends series at City Winery in downtown New York with a show featuring Pierce Turner and Zack Glass, plus songs with Suzanne Vega.

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Richard Goode performs solo works by Bach and Chopin at Strathmore Hall in North Bethesda, Maryland, for a Washington Performing Arts Society concert.

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Glenn Kotche joins the Bang on a Can All-Stars and composer Terry Riley, fresh from the Kronos performances, for the featured performance of the Bang on a Can Marathon at the University of Maryland's Dekelboum Concert Hall Sunday afternoon. On the program are Kotche's Mobile, Snap, and, an adaptation of Steve Reich's work, Clapping Music Variations, as well as Riley's Autodreamographical Tales. "There are other places to hear new contemporary music," Vanity Fair has written of the Marathon, "but it is seldom offered with such a potent blend of intensity, authority, and abandon."

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k.d. lang will appear at the Juno Awards ceremony at GM Place in Vancouver Sunday night as a presenter and a nominee as both Artist of the Year and Producer of the Year for her 2008 Nonesuch release, Watershed. Prior to Sunday's event, she'll be at Jackson Hall at the Mondavi Performing Arts Center in Davis, California, tonight, and at Pepper Concert Hall in Wendover, Nevada, Saturday, before heading up to Vancouver for the Junos.

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Brad Mehldau continues his European tour, tonight in a solo set at the Temple in Cully, Switzerland, for the Cully Jazz Festival; Saturday with his Trio at MC2 in Grenoble, France, for the Grenoble Jazz Festival; and Sunday, also with the Trio, at the Cedac de Cimiez in Nice.

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Mandy Patinkin continues his extensive US tour with Patti LuPone this Sunday at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. After a couple weeks hiatus, the tour resumes with several nights at the Fisher Theatre in Detroit, Michigan, in mid-April.

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Punch Brothers play two shows in Georgia this weekend: tonight at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta and Saturday at the Lucas Theatre for the Savannah Music Festival. Next week it's two shows in Tennessee.

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Joshua Redman continues his Trio tour, only now with Matt Penman taking over on bass for Reuben Rogers; Greg Hutchinson remains on drums. The Trio pass by Brad Mehldau at the Cully Jazz Festival, performing a day after their label mate, at the Chapiteau on Saturday. On Sunday, they'll close out the European leg of the our at the Roxy in Ulm, Germany, before heading home to set up shop at Yoshi's Oakland next week.

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Jeff Tweedy performs two solo sets this weekend, the first with Wilco band mate Mikael Jorgensen's Pronto project opening at the Calvin Theater in Northampton, Massachusetts, and next at the Beacon High School in upstate Beacon, New York, a fundraiser for the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, an organization co-founded by Pete Seeger to fight pollution on New York's longest river.

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In advance of the April 7 release of her solo debut album, Sara Watkins plays two shows in North Carolina this weekend, opening for John Prine at Charlotte's Ovens Auditorium tonight and Thomas Wolfe Auditorium in Asheville on Saturday. Houston Ramblings says the forthcoming record "is a real thing of beauty ... The record clings tightly to Watkins' bluegrass roots without necessarily being a bluegrass album ..."