The Low Anthem, the newest member of the Nonesuch artist roster, is on the road with Ray LaMontagne this month. After a sold-out show at the Wellmont Theatre in Montclair, New Jersey, last night, they'll play another sold-out set at the Palace Theatre in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, tonight. They play another Pennsylvania gig, at the Tower Theatre in Upper Darby, outside Philadelphia, on Saturday. Before joining LaMontagne again on Monday in Albany, they group will open for Josh Ritter at the Tarrytown Music Hall in Tarrytown, New York, Sunday night.

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John Adams's 2008 String Quartet, only his second such piece after his 1994 piece for Kronos Quartet, John's Book of Alleged Dances, receives its West Coast premiere by the St. Lawrence String Quartet at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Auditorium Sunday afternoon at 2:30 PM. The group premiered the piece this past January at the Juilliard School in New York.

San Jose Mercury News writer Richard Scheinin writes of the piece from the man he describes as "arguably the most celebrated composer alive":

There are ravishing harmonies, warm-glowing, like sunlight on water; passages of murmured lyricism; stretches driven by churning rhythms that turn the quartet into a gutsy string band. There are also moments that are physically bracing, then pleading and strangely ethereal, recalling late Beethoven quartets.

Read more at mercurynews.com.

Also on Sunday, a world away, the Graz Opera Ballet continues its performances of choreographer Darrel Toulon's Swan Trilogy, set, in part, to a number of Adams works: The Dharma at Big Sur, Gnarly Buttons, Road Movies, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and Tromba Lontana.

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Laurie Anderson will join her husband, Lou Reed, on stage at the Chandler Center for the Arts in Chandler, Arizona, outside Phoenix, for Mind Meets Music, a concert benefiting the Yongey Peace Prevails Center, on Sunday. The event also features an introduction to meditation & music by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.

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Dan Auerbach follows a stellar set of shows in his two-week US tour and three sets of shows at the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, with a string of dates on the other side of the world, in Australia, starting tonight at the Great Northern Hotel in Byron Bay. He'll be at The Zoo in Brisbane on Saturday and The Basement in Sydney on Sunday.

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David Byrne continues the UK leg of his Songs of David Byrne & Brian Eno world tour with two shows in England this weekend: at Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool tonight; Irwin Mitchell Oval Hall in Sheffield Saturday night. The tour heads to both ends of the island of Ireland early next week.

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Christina Courtin, whose self-titled Nonesuch debut album is due out later this spring, takes over for two hours at Rockwood Music Hall in downtown New York City Saturday night. She'll open for legendary singer-songwriter Robin Hitchcock at the Filmore New York (Irving Plaza) next weekend.

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Toumani Diabaté, after a string of duo dates with Béla Fleck, has joined the banjo master's Africa Project, inspired by the award-winning documentary Throw Down Your Heart and featuring many of the musicians Fleck met on his recent trip to Uganda, Tanzania, Gambia, and Mali, exploring the African roots of the banjo. The group tours the South in its upcoming dates: at Knoxville's Tennesse Theatre tonight; the Trustees Theater for the Savannah Music Festival in Georgia on Saturday; and the University of Florida in Gainsville on Sunday.

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Bill Frisell concludes a series of concerts with his Disfarmer Project in California this weekend. The shows incorporate the work of the artist Mike Disfarmer, whose photos from WW II-era rural Arkansas are projected on stage during the band's performance. "As Bill Frisell’s reputation for innovative, improvisational jazz-guitar work expanded over three decades," says the Denver Decider, "so did his list of collaborators, eventually encompassing both John Zorn and Elvis Costello." Among the collaborators joining Frisell for the Disfarmer Project are bassist Viktor Krauss, steel guitarist Greg Leisz, and violinist Jenny Scheinman. The Quartet performed at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles last night and head up to the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco as part of the spring season of SFJAZZ tonight. The final show of the set takes place at the Mondavi Center at University of California, Davis, on Sunday.

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It's a Philip Glass weekend at Mercersberg Academy in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, including two student workshops and a concert. This first workshop, held this afternoon, focuses on creativity and collaboration and is titled Open Ears. Tomorrow morning, Glass joins the students for the second workshop, titled Glass, the Composer: Soundtracking. Both events will be held  at the school's Hale Studio Theatre. Later that night, the composer will perform a program of his chamber music with cellist Wendy Sutter at the Academy's Simon Theatre.

After those Mercersberg events, Glass heads into New York City for the fourth and final event in his weekly Sunday-night concert series at City Winery. He'll be joined by Patti Smith for Footnote to Howl, The Poet Speaks, an homage to poet Allen Ginsberg.

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The Brad Mehldau Trio close out their week in France with a performance at the Palais des Congres in Le Mans tonight and the Salle des Fêtes in Schiltigheim on Sunday. Brad closes out the Europe tour with solo dates in Italy and at Wigmore Hall in London next week.

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Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love, the film documenting the creation and reception of N'Dour's 2004 Grammy-winning album, Egypt, screens at Madison, Wisconsin's Orpheum Main Theater Sunday evening, as part of the 2009 Wisconsin Film Festival. For future festival screenings, click here.

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Punch Brothers are touring the Midwest for another week, with two college stops after last night's performance at Ohio University: the Goshen College Performing Arts Center in Goshen, Indiana, tonight, and the McAninch Art Center at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. On Sunday, they'll perform at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Minneapolis-St. Paul edition of The Decider, from the Onion's A.V. Club, writes:

The five-piece string band of crack players debuted in 2008 with Punch, much of which comprises a long, four-track suite, The Blind Leaving the Blind. "Suite" is definitely the right word for it: Rather than an extended hot-picking session, it’s a complex piece marked with plentiful shifts of pace and mood, building off traditional themes but flirting with improvisation and dissonant harmonies. Even the lyrics unravel the bluegrass base, centering on yarns of love and sin but shading them with trickier, more detailed introspection.

Read more at twincities.decider.com.

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Bay Area native Joshua Redman is back on his home turf this week to play a five-night residency—nine shows—at Yoshi's in Oakland, that began earlier this weekend and continues through Sunday. He's joined by bassist Matt Penman, of the SFJAZZ Collective, and drummer Greg Hutchinson, a featured player on Redman's latest Nonesuch release, the double-trio album Compass.

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Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians provides the setting for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's performances of choreographer Elisa Monte's 1981 piece Treading, featured in the company's current US tour celebrating its 50th anniversary season. The piece is on tonight's program and again tomorrow night, along with Mauro Bigonzetti's Festa Barocca and Ailey's famed 1960 piece Revelations, at Chicago's Auditorium Theater. The tour continues through May.

Reich's 1995 work Proverb provides the music and title for a dance piece by choreographer Eliot Feld. It is featured in the Ballet Tech Mandance Project's spring residency at the Joyce Theater in New York City. Performances run each night this weekend, with an additional matinee performance Sunday afternoon.