As noted earlier today in the Nonesuch Journal, the Barbican presents its 2014 marathon weekend on Saturday and Sunday, this year celebrating Nonesuch Records at 50. Entitled Explorations: The Sound of Nonesuch Records, this curated weekend of events includes five London concerts taking place in LSO St Luke's, Milton Court Concert Hall, and the Barbican Hall. Featured among the weekend's events are Jonny Greenwood, Kronos Quartet, Brad Mehldau, Timo Andres, Sam Amidon, Natalie Merchant, Rhiannon Giddens, Olivia Chaney, and others performing works by Greenwood, Mehldau, Andres, Steve Reich, John Adams, Philip Glass, Frederic Rzewski, Louis Andriessen, Henryk Górecki, Donnacha Dennehy, and more.

Satellite events, which began earlier this month in concerts from Rokia Traoré, Devendra Banhart, Natalie Merchant, and Kronos Quartet, continue later in the month from Jeremy Denk, Emmylou Harris, Caetano Veloso, and Toumani & Sidiki Diabaté.

For all the details, visit barbican.co.uk.

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The Black Keys headline set the sold-out Hangout Music Festival, performing on the beaches of Gulf Shores, Alabama, tonight at 9 PM CT. In celebration of the release of their new album, Turn Blue, the band performed on the Late Show with David Letterman and The Colbert Report earlier this week. The band also spoke with NPR's Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition, which you can hear here. Rolling Stone gives the new album four-and-a-half stars, calling it “the best, most consistently gripping album The Black Keys have ever made.” The AP hears “the sound of a band operating at the peak of its power.” Across the Atlantic, Turn Blue was Album of the Week in the Guardian, the Times, Metro, and Independent, which gives it five stars, calling it “a post-modern blues-rock marvel.” The Keys kick off a summer festival tour of Europe on June 20; tickets for the band’s fall North American tour go on sale today.

Catch the band's set streaming live tonight at 9 PM CT (10 PM ET / 7 PM PT) at hangoutmusicfest.com.

Conor Oberst is also at the Hangout Music Festival tonight, performing on the Palladia Stage at 7:30 PM. He continues the first leg of his world tour at Track 29 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Saturday, with Dawes as special guest, both opening the shows and acting as his band for the tour. Oberst’s Nonesuch debut album, Upside Down Mountain, is due out on Monday, but you don’t need to wait till then to hear it: the album is streaming in full all this week as an NPR First Listen. The new album is “artful and beautifully realized,” writes NPR's Tom Moon. “Upside Down Mountain suggests that Oberst is growing, rapidly, as a craftsman.” The singer/songwriter celebrates the release of his new album on NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Monday and on CBS This Morning next Saturday.

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John Adams’s City Noir is performed by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra—featuring Timothy McAllister on saxophone—at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center’s Laura Turner Concert Hall in Nashville tonight and on Saturday. Conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero, the program also includes saxophonist Branford Marsalis performing works by Villa-Lobos, John Williams, and Gershwin. Nonesuch released a recording of City Noir last week (international release to follow next week) which also comprises the debut recording of Adams’s Saxophone Concerto, both of which are performed by the St. Louis Symphony and McAllister.

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Shawn Colvin rejoins fellow singer-songwriter Steve Earle to kick off the May leg of their “Songs and Stories, Together Onstage” duo tour at Urban Grace Church in Tacoma, Washington, on Saturday and the Aladdin Theater in Portland, Oregon, 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 continues out West in Oregon, California, and Arizona through the end of the month.

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Two songs from Jacob Cooper’s debut Nonesuch album, Silver Threads, are on the program at the Cell Theater in New York City on Saturday, as part of the Tribeca New Music Festival. Soprano Mellissa Hughes, for whom Cooper wrote the six-song cycle, will sing them at the event, with the composer on electronics.

The Independent praises the “delicate electronic backdrops” on Silver Threads, while Q2 Music writes, “The electronics accompanying soloist Hughes reveal a keen ear for finer points of ambiance and timbre, as well as a canny ear for pop affect.”

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Jeremy Denk joins the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Music Director Jeffrey Kahane for two shows in California this weekend: at the Alex Theater in Glendale on Saturday and Royce Hall in Los Angeles on Sunday. He performs selected piano études by Ligeti—as heard on his 2012 Nonesuch recording, Ligeti/Beethoven—and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 15. This previews Denk’s musical directorship of the Ojai Festival in California June 12–15, which culminates in a concert that features him performing the Ligeti études in their entirety.

“The conceptions in the etudes are death defying,” Denk explained in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. “They are complex but visceral. Their gestures are well defined and powerful. There's passages—little, seemingly innocuous ones—in which there's slowing down, and every chord is immaculate and perfect and has wit and elegance.” He also discussed the impetus for his latest album, a recording of the Goldberg Variations, released last year on Nonesuch Records. 

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Richard Goode performs an all-Beethoven programs at two universities in California this weekend: Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall tonight and Sonoma State’s Weill Hall in Rohnert Park on Sunday. The concerts feature four of the composer’s late works: Sonatas Nos. 30–32 and Bagatelles, Op. 119. Goode famously recorded a landmark set of the Complete Beethoven Sonatas for Nonesuch in 1993; his latest Nonesuch release is the three-CD set of the Complete Beethoven Piano Concertos.

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Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica chamber orchestra round out their seven-night tour with Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla at Rudolfinum’s Dvořák Hall in Prague tonight and Brucknerhaus’s Grosser Saal in Linz, Austria, on Sunday. On the program are Artūr Maskats’s Midnight in Riga, Bernstein’s Serenade, and Bizet-Shchedrin’s Carmen Suite. Kremer and his orchestra head next to Bavaria to join Latvian conductor Andris Vesimanis for two concerts—entitled “Arabic-Baltic Spring”—at the end of the month.

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Pat Metheny Unity Group—woodwind player Chris Potter, drummer Antonio Sanchez, bassist Ben Williams, and multi-instrumentalist Giulio Carmassi—kicks off the German leg of its European tour at Alte Oper in Frankfurt tonight and the Mitsubishi Electrik Halle in Dusseldorf on Saturday. The tour, in support of the recently released album Kin (←→), continues in Hamburg, Kaiserslautern, Dortmund, Ravensburg, and Munich through the end of the week.

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Nickel Creek continues to perform out West with two sold-out shows this weekend: at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, Oregon, tonight and the Moore Theatre in Seattle on Saturday. Once again, the band’s performances feature songs from their new album, A Dotted Line, released last month on Nonesuch Records, and opening sets by the Secret Sisters. The US tour takes the trio to three Californian cities in the days ahead.

Following the band’s recent swing through the Midwest, Minnesota Public Radio's The Current calls a recent performance "dynamic and thrilling for every second ... transcendent." The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says: “Their effortless picking, strumming and fiddling belied the intricacy and precision of their work as they traded full solos and glancing phrases …. What couldn't be hidden was the camaraderie of three artists who've been playing together since their preteen years.”

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Joshua Redman Quartet—Aaron Goldberg, Reuben Rogers, and Marcus Gilmore—concludes its three-night residency at the Cotton Club in Tokyo tonight. The group heads to South Korea for the Seoul Jazz Festival on Monday before returning to the US in June. Redman’s forthcoming album, Trios Live, due June 17, was recorded at New York’s Jazz Standard and Washington, DC’s Blues Alley during stands with two different trios, and is available to pre-order in the Nonesuch Store now.