Composer John Adams conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in France this weekend: they perform Adams’s 2014 dramatic symphony Scheherazade.2 with violinist Leila Josefowicz, for whom the piece was written, at Opéra de Dijon tonight and Philharmonie de Paris on Saturday. Adams then conducts the LSO in his 2000 Nativity Oratorio, El Niño, at the Philharmonie on Sunday. The Evening Standard gives their performance of El Niño at the Barbican last weekend five stars, praising the work’s “numinous aura, enhanced by a score of stunning inventiveness” and its “hypnotic, shimmering textures.”

Josefowicz has been nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo for her performance on the first recording of Scheherazade.2, with the St. Louis Symphony led by David Roberston, released on Nonesuch this past September. Nonesuch released the world premiere recording of El Niño, featuring singers Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Dawn Upshaw, and Willard White, in 2001.

---

Speaking of John Adams, Timo Andres gives a performance of his Grand Pianola Music with fellow pianist David Kaplan, tubist Alan Baer, and the Rutgers Wind Ensemble, conducted by Kraig Williams, at Rutgers University’s Nicholas Music Center in Brunswick, New Jersey, on Saturday. The New Yorker noted the ties between the two composers some years ago, saying that Andres’s 2007 piece Shy and Mighty achieves "an unhurried grandeur that has rarely been felt in American music since John Adams came on the scene."

---

Jeremy Denk gives a solo piano recital, performing Beethoven’s “Tempest,” Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, and Ives’s Concord Sonata, at the Baldwin Auditorium at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, on Saturday. The New York Times says Denk “is a pianist you want to hear no matter what he performs, in whatever combination—both for his penetrating intellectual engagement with the music and for the generosity of his playing.”

---

The Mark Morris Dance Group performs The Hard Nut, Morris’s modern retelling of The Nutcracker now celebrating its 25 anniversary, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM)’s Howard Gilman Opera House, as part of its 2016 Next Wave Festival. The first of nine holiday-season performances takes place Saturday afternoon, followed by an evening performance, a Sunday matinee, and additional performances through next weekend.

In 2007, Nonesuch released a DVD of the original 1991 performance of The Hard Nut, which the New York Times says "creates a marvelously musical, choreographically ingenious response to Tchaikovsky’s great score that has its own magic and speaks its own truths about the nature of love … What makes The Hard Nut so lovable, and indispensable is a sweetness and spaciousness very like its traditional Tchaikovsky score."

---

Conor Oberst concludes his fall tour of North America with two sold-out shows at The Cathedral Sanctuary at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles tonight and tomorrow. He embarks on a tour of Europe in January.

As noted earlier today in the Nonesuch Journal, a full-band recording of "Tachycardia," a song on Oberst's 2016 solo album, Ruminations, paired with "Afterthought," an unreleased track from the Ruminations recording sessions, first made available as a Record Store Day Black Friday vinyl 7", are now available digitally.

---

Selections from Steve Reich’s Drumming are performed by Ghanaian percussionist Gideon Alorwoyie and the Mantra Percussion Ensemble at National Sawdust in Brooklyn on Saturday. Nonesuch released a recording of the 1971 symphonic-length percussion piece in 1987. Inspired by African rhythms, Indonesian gamelan, and Reich’s 1970 visit to Ghana to study with Alorwoyie, Drumming has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the most important work of the whole minimalist music movement.”

---

Chris Thile continues his inaugural season as host of A Prairie Home Companion with a sold-out show at The Town Hall in New York City on Saturday. Joining him as special guests for the episode are Steve Martin and his bluegrass compatriots the Steep Canyon Rangers, bassist Edgar Meyer, world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and comedian Marina Franklin. Folks in the US can tune in on their favorite public radio station this weekend, and fans around the world can watch the live broadcast online at prairiehome.org starting at 5:45 PM ET. Thile and Edgar Meyer have released two records together on Nonesuch: a self-titled album in 2008 and 2014’s Bass & Mandolin, which won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Instrumental Performance.

Chris Thile and a different duo partner, Brad Mehldau, who will release an album together in January, can be seen performing from it on CBS This Morning Saturday.