On the banks of the Rideau River, the five-day Ottawa Folk Festival got underway at Hog’s Back Park earlier this week and continues through the weekend with music, dance, beer gardens, workshops, and more, including sets from three Nonesuch artists: Emmylou Harris, Sam Amidon, and Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell perform the closing set on the Tartan Homes Stage tonight at 8:15 PM, kicking off the next leg of their Old Yellow Moon duo tour, as noted earlier today in the Nonesuch Journal. They head next to Saugerties, New York, on Sunday, for HITS-on-the-Hudson, concluding a championship weekend of horse shows. Crowell spoke with the Ottawa Citizen about his relationship with Harris and much more in advance of tonight's set for an article available online at ottawacitizen.com.

Sam Amidon, who kicked of his North American tour last night in Toronto, offers a set on the same Tartan Homes stage on Sunday at 6:30 PM. He also participates in a free workshop titled Home Away from Home on the Slackwater Stage Saturday afternoon, discussing the musician's life of touring and travelling around the world. Amidon’s tour, featuring music from his new album, Bright Sunny South, continues through mid-October. On September 24, Bright Sunny South will be released on vinyl, available to pre-order now in the Nonesuch Store.

Carolina Chocolate Drops, as part of their on-going North American tour, perform two sets at Ottawa Folk Festival: on the Tartan Homes Stage at 6:30 PM on Saturday and the CUPE-SCFP Stage at 7 PM on Sunday.

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A decade after Ravinia Pavilion opened its summer season with John Adams and Peter Sellars’s Nativity oratorio El Niño, their vision of a Passion, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, receives its Midwest premiere at Ravinia in Highland Park outside Chicago on Saturday. Conductor Grant Gershon leads the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra and the singers who first performed the piece—mezzo-sopranos Kelley O'Connor and Tamara Mumford, tenor Russell Thomas, and the Los Angeles Master Chorale—in this outdoor performance. The Chicago Sun-Times, in a feature preview of the concert, calls the piece “one of [Adams’s] most daring and ambitious works ever.”

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Laurie Anderson performs Dirtday! at the Sheraton Hotel in Sopot, Poland, tonight, as part of the ARTLOOP Festival. Dirtday! is the third and final piece in Anderson’s triptych of solo story works, which also includes Happiness and The End of the Moon.

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Björk headlines the Berlin Festival on Saturday. Earlier this week, she concluded a two-year, world-wide tour of music from her latest album, Biophilia, at London's Alexandra Palace, earning four stars for the performance from the Guardian, Independent, Financial Times, and Evening Standard.

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Bombino brings the music of his recently released Nonesuch debut album, Nomad, to three European countries this weekend: at Riksscenen in Oslo, Norway, tonight; Jardin Roussy in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, on Saturday, as part of the Nox Orae Festival; and Vlieland in the Netherlands on Sunday, as part of the Into the Great Wide Open festival. He returns to all three of these countries as well as stopping in Israel, Italy, Belgium, Finland, the UK, and France, before returning to the US in November.

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Dr. John offers three Southern sets this weekend: two in Louisiana—a sold-out Louisiana Crossroads Season gala opener at Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette tonight and the Manship Theatre in Baton Rouge on Sunday—with a stop at the Miller Outdoor Theatre in Houston on Saturday. He performs in three California cities later this month before heading to Japan.

Dr. John and his fellow New Orleans native son Bobby Rush have teamed up to record a benefit song for Crimestoppers, the grassroots organization that aims to reduce violent crime in town. The track, entitled “Another Murder in New Orleans,” is available for download on the Crimestoppers website and will receive its live debut at the organization’s Patron Party at Generations Hall on September 11.

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Audra McDonald performs at two Utah universities this weekend: at Brigham Young University’s Harris Fine Arts Center in Provo tonight (the second of two consecutive evenings), and Weber State University’s Browning Center for the Performing Arts in Ogden on Saturday. McDonald—whose first solo album in seven years, Go Back Home, was released earlier this year on Nonesuch—continues to tour around North America through December with performances in Austin, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Kansas City, Toronto, and more.

The four-month tour began at the San Francisco Symphony’s Opening Night Gala this past Tuesday, with McDonald providing “the classiest part of the annual black-tie event,” according to the San Jose Mercury News music critic Richard Scheinin. “It’s hard not to gush over McDonald,” describing her voice as “elegant, earthy and almost absurdly plush, while sailing across its canyon-wide range.”

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Punch Brothers, following their festival-opening set at the Telluride Film Festival last week, perform at the Interlocken Music Festival taking place at Oak Ridge Farm in Arrington, Virginia, on Saturday.

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Soprano Dawn Upshaw performs at Bard College’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in Annandale-on-Hudson in New York on Saturday, as part of the sold-out Joan Tower 75th Birthday benefit concert. Since 2006, Upshaw has been the artistic director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at Bard College’s Conservatory of Music. As part of her role, Upshaw leads professional development workshop seminars that focus on career-management, from writing press releases and choosing publicity photos to finding performance opportunities, which, according to Opera News, are “part of an important sea change in the education of young performers.” Read the full article by Allan Kozinn at operanews.com.

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Sara Watkins stays close to home with a performance at The Irenic in San Diego Saturday night, supporting local artist The Tree Ring and Tiny Telephones.