Rhiannon Giddens returns to her alma mater, Oberlin College, in Ohio to perform as Julie in two sold-out performances of her and Michael Abel’s Pulitzer Prize–winning opera Omar, at Finney Chapel tonight and the Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center in Cleveland on Sunday, both available to watch around the world via livestream. To accompany the performances, Oberlin College is hosting several panel discussions with Giddens and others addressing the show’s themes on Saturday and a post-concert talkback with Giddens, conductor John Kennedy, and other cast members on Sunday. Omar is based on the life and autobiography of enslaved Muslim scholar Omar Ibn Said, who was forcefully brought to Charleston from Africa in 1807. The opera premiered in 2022 at the Spoleto Festival and has been performed by the LA Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Boston Lyric Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Carolina Performing Arts. Ahead of its 2022 premiere, Giddens released a recording of “Julie’s Aria” from the opera on which she performs with guitarist Bill Frisell and Francesco Turrisi, you can listen to it here.

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Composer John Adams’s Nativity opera-oratorio El Niño is performed by soprano Julia Bullock, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, the Bavarian Radio Choir, and the Munich Radio Orchestra, conducted by Bullock’s husband Christian Reif, at Sacred Heart Church in Munich, Germany, tonight. The premiere recording of El Niño, featuring Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Dawn Upshaw, and Willard White, was released on Nonesuch in 2001. Bullock performs Memorial De Tlatelolco, from the piece, on her 2022 debut solo album, Walking in the Dark, which won the GRAMMY Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album.

Meanwhile, in Canada, composers John Adams, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass’s works are performed by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Otto Tausk, at the Orpheum in Vancouver, tonight. The program features the Canadian premiere of Steve Reich’s new work Jacob’s Ladder, Adams’s Gnarly Buttons, Glass’s Eleventh Symphony, and more.

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Timo Andres and Sarah Kirkland Snider are among the special guests of pianist Adam Tendler at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium in New York City Saturday night to celebrate the release of Tendler’s new album, Inheritance. Andres’s own new album, The Blind Banister, released earlier this year on Nonesuch, was nominated for the GRAMMY Award for Best Engineered Album, Classical.

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Hurray for the Riff Raff, aka Alynda Segarra, brings music from their new album, The Past is Still Alive, to WYXR’s Raised By Sound Fest at the Crosstown Concourse in Memphis, Tennessee, on Saturday. The Past is Still Alive made several year-end lists, including those of Rolling Stone, NPR Music, Paste, and Pitchfork, which exclaims: "Nine albums in, Alynda Segarra made the record of their lifetime."

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Cécile McLorin Salvant and her band—pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Kyle Poole—perform at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center in Virginia tonight and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Memorial Hall in North Carolina, on Saturday. Salvant was named Female Vocalist of the Year in the DownBeat Critics Poll, and her latest album, Mélusine, made the Jazz Albums of the Year list. “The massively creative vocalist delivers a tour de force in several languages recounting the legend of Mélusine,” the magazine says.

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Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion conclude their tour this weekend, performing music from their newly GRAMMY-nominated album, Rectangles and Circumstance, at Amare in The Hague, Netherlands, on Sunday. Ringdown, Shaw’s duo with Danni Lee Parpan, performs as well, both on the Rectangles and Circumstance track “Slow Motion,” which the duo co-wrote and performed on the album, and in a mini-set during the shows. Shaw and Sō were on BBC Radio 3’s Saturday Morning to discuss the album and perform live in the studio; you can hear that here. Sō can also be heard on Shaw's original score to Ken Burns's documentary LEONARDO da VINCI along with Attacca Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, and John Patitucci. The film premiered last month on PBS and is now streaming via PBS.org and the PBS App.

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Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway bring music from their critically acclaimed album City of Gold and more to California, playing shows at UC Santa Barbara’s Campbell Hall in tonight, and The Fillmore in San Francisco on Saturday, the latter as part of the Rex Foundation Benefit. Earlier this year, the band won the IBMA Bluegrass Music Award for Album of the Year for their Grammy-winning album City of Gold and released a six-song EP, Into the Wild. Last month, Tuttle joined Dierks Bentley, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, and Sierra Hull at the CMA’s performing Tom Petty’s “American Girl"; you can watch that here.