Steve Reich joins the London Sinfonietta, Bang on a Can, and Synergy Vocals for an all-Reich concert at Royal Festival Hall in London's Southbank Centre Saturday night. On the program are Clapping Music, Electric Counterpoint, Sextet, and Music for 18 Musicians. The concert, which is sold out, will also be broadcast live on screen by the Southbank Centre in The Clore Ballroom at Royal Festival Hall; admission is free. Afterward, the composer will be on hand in the Ballroom in a free, post-concert discussion of his work.

The composer spoke with BBC Radio 3's In Tune host Sean Rafferty about the upcoming performances last night. Rafferty also plays a number of Reich's works, including the opening to Music for 18 Musicians. You can listen again online for the next six days at bbc.co.uk.
 
On Sunday, Reich and Bang on a Can head to Lisbon, Portugal, for another program of the composer's music, in the Grande Auditório of the CCB. Works will include Clapping Music, NY Counterpoint, Piano Phase/Video Phase, Music for Pieces of Wood, Electric Counterpoint, and Sextet.

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John Adams's Violin Concerto will be paired with Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade and Stravinsky's Firebird Suite in a performance by violinist Leila Josefowicz with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Robert Spano, at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall tonight, with an encore performance tomorrow morning. After Josefowicz's performance of the piece last Friday with the North Carolina Symphony, the Raleigh News Observer wrote that, resistant as area audiences have been to contemporary programming, "the audience clearly approved of Adams' 1993 Violin Concerto, as brilliantly performed by Leila Josefowicz and conductor William Henry Curry." The paper cites the composer's music as "works that draw listeners in through color and excitement while still maintaining a unique, demanding style."

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Laurie Anderson celebrates Halloween not far from the bustle of the great Greenwich Village parade in New York City, if a bit earlier in the day. She helps kick off the free day-long Halloween Wonder Cabinet at NYU's Cantor Film Center on Saturday. It's curated by author Lawrence Weschler and described as "a day of sublimely odd, wonderflecked and just plain cool presentations, braided one after the next in a thematic order intermittently evident to himself, if no one else." Laurie will be discussing her work as NASA's first artist-in-residence.

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The Black Keys help kick off the 11th Voodoo Fest, the three-day festival in New Orleans's City Park Friday night, an event the Times-Picayune says "promises to conjure a Halloween weekend to remember."

Saturday at noon, tickets go on sale for The Wild World of Alfred McMoore, a multimedia retrospective at Akron, Ohio, venue Musica, with a performance by The Black Keys. The event will take place on November 27 and will benefit Community Support Services. That night, the pencil and crayon drawings of outsider artist Alfred McMoore will be on display. The phrase "black key" was a favorite expression of McMoore's, providing the inspiration for the band's name. He passed away in September. You can read more about this friend of the band in the Nonesuch Journal. For more on the show and tickets, visit akronmusica.com.

Also, tune in to this Sunday's episode of HBO's new series Bored to Death to hear the song "The Prowl" off of Dan Auerbach's solo debut, Keep It Hid, featured in a bar scene late in the show with actors Jason Schwartzman, Zach Galiafanikis, and Ted Danson. For more information, visit hbo.com/boredtodeath.

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Christina Courtin concludes her cross-country tour with Brooklyn-based trio Elizabeth & the Catapult with a final performance in her hometown of Buffalo, New York, at Tralf Music Hall tonight.
 
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Bill Frisell wraps up his tour of Italy with the 858 Quartet, featuring Ron Miles, Hank Roberts, Eyvind Kang, performing at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, tonight, and the Blue Note Milano on Saturday. Up next next week: Spain.

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The Low Anthem's tour with Blind Pilot continues across the South with a performance at the Spanish Moon in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, tonight. That city's Tigerweekly praised the band's "well-balanced tones and riveting lyrics," concluding: "The sincerity of each song tugs at the heart strings. They have a pure sound that is rare in today's music world."

The tour heads to Tallahassee next week, and the Tallahasse Democrat says it's "a double feature that's hard to pass up," describing The Low Anthem's Nonesuch debut, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, as "a wonder, indeed."

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Brad Mehldau Trio makes three tour stops in Portugal this weekend,  performing at Teatro Micaelense in São Miguel tonight, Teatro de Estarreja in Estarreja Saturday, and the Cine-Teatre in Alcobaça Sunday. The Trio next heads north for shows in Austria, Germany, and France, next week.
 
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Nicholas Payton and Don Byron will be joined by special guest Iva Bittová in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral tonight for the SFJAZZ Fall Festival's Sacred Space concert. The San Francisco Chronicle, in a preview of the event, describes Payton as "a fine composer with an ear for all kinds of music" and Byron as a "brilliant clarinetist" and "an unclassifiable creator who has dug into a vast range of music." Payton, for his part, tells the Chronicle that even when not performing in such surroundings, "Music is sacred to me, period ... It's a very spiritual endeavor. It's all about the transference of energy and dialogue between people. Every moment in my life that I play music is a sacred moment." You can read more at sfgate.com. Payton then takes his own sacred sounds to Arizona for a performance at the Tempe Center for the Arts on Saturday.

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Sara Watkins makes the last stop on her six-week solo tour, stopping at the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre in Bloomington, Indiana, tonight. She'll be on the road again starting with a concert at Largo in LA November 10.