Chris Thile continues his inaugural season as host of A Prairie Home Companion with a sold-out show at the program’s home base, the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on Saturday. Joining him as a special guest for the episode is label mate and collaborator Brad Mehldau, as well as the band Lucius and comedian Tom Papa. 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 4:45 PM CT.

Thile and Mehldau released their debut duo record last month on Nonesuch. "This meeting of two masters of their respective realms is a spine-tingling triumph,” raves the Irish Times in a five-star review. The Guardian calls the album "remarkable.” Brad Mehldau is up for two Grammy Awards this Sunday: Best Improvised Jazz Solo for his take on the Cole Porter tune "I Concentrate on You," on the new Brad Mehldau Trio album, Blues and Ballads, and Best Jazz Instrumental Album with Joshua Redman for their debut duo album, Nearness.

Also this weekend, Thile meets up with another Nonesuch collaborator, guitarist Michael Daves. The two perform a duo set at the Ground Up Music Festival in Miami Beach on Sunday. They released a duo album of traditional bluegrass tunes, Sleep with One Eye Open, on Nonesuch in 2011. The duo makes for "a rip-roaring partnership," says the New York Times. "Bluegrass, in their hands, gets roughed up in the best possible way, with skill and fervor, and a touch of abandon." Daves released his own album, Orchids and Violence, on Nonesuch last year.

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Composer John Adams turns 70 next week, and his birthday celebrations continue with sold-out performances by members of the San Francisco Symphony and others led by conductor Chris Rountree at the SoundBox space of Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco tonight and Saturday. Adams hosts and curates the program, titled Emergent, which pairs three of his works—Hallelujah Junction, selections from John’s Book of Alleged Dances, and his 1973 piece Ragamarole—with works by Jacob Cooper, Ashley Fure, and Andrew Norman. The full San Francisco Symphony performs Adams’s The Gospel According to the Other Mary next week and his Scheherazade.2 the following week.

In an interview with the composer, ahead of the many celebratory events this month, the San Francisco Classical Voice says: “Adams has ever been an innovator, as well as a musical spokesperson for progressive insight and activism, including feminism, and for cross-cultural expression.” You can read what Adams had to say here.

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Sam Amidon continues his tour with the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) and Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto in Sydney this weekend, with shows at the City Recital Hall this afternoon and Saturday night, followed by a performance at Sydney Opera House Concert Hall on Sunday afternoon. On the program, titled Murder & Redemption, the ACO performs Janáček's Kreutzer Sonata, based on the dark Tolstoy short story of the same name, and John Adams's Shaker Loops. Interweaved throughout are arrangements of traditional folk songs—murder ballads and songs of salvation—that Amidon has re-written and will sing; Pekka and the ACO perform arrangements by composer Nico Muhly to accompany the songs.

In its review of a recent performance, the Australian writes, “Contrasted against the refined backdrop of Janáček and Adams, Amidon’s earthy, soul-bearing vocals and unadorned guitar and banjo technique open meticulous conduits into the pain, introspection and humour that thread through folk melody and the fabric of struggle woven into its lyrics.”

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Laurie Anderson joins Philip Glass for Words and Music in Two Parts, a sold-out performance at Memorial Hall at UNC Chapel Hill tonight, the culminating event of the venue’s two-week festival celebrating Glass’s 80th birthday. Tonight’s program features Glass’s song cycle Monsters of Grace, collaborative performances and poetry readings between the two artists, and a selection of Glass songs setting words by the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi, performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble and a group of longtime Glass vocalists. Kronos Quartet joined the composer for a performance of his score to the 1931 film Dracula in the festival’s penultimate event last night.

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Devendra Banhart continues his two-month North American tour of music from his new album, Ape in Pink Marble, with a show at Taos Mesa Brewing in El Prado, New Mexico, on Sunday. Uncut calls the album "excellent," praising Banhart as an “accomplished shaper of moods and atmosphere.”

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Pianist Richard Goode, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, and conductor Iván Fischer conclude their US tour with an all-Beethoven program at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, tonight, and Boston Symphony Hall on Sunday. Both concerts include Symphony No. 1 and Piano Concert No. 4; tonight’s concert closes with the Ninth Symphony No. 9 and Sunday’s with the Fifth.

The performers released a recording of the complete Beethoven piano concertos on Nonesuch in 2009, making Goode one of very few American pianists to have recorded the complete Beethoven concertos, and the first to do so in nearly 20 years. The Financial Times gave the three-disc set five stars and declared it a "landmark recording of the Beethoven concertos." The New Yorker wrote: “Goode offers truly revelatory playing, turning that shameless virtuoso showcase into a vibrant, three-dimensional creation.” He recently spoke with the Huffington Post about his affinity for the work of Beethoven; you can read the interview here.

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Kronos Quartet returns to Carnegie Hall for a concert in Zankel Hall on Saturday, joined by balafon player Fodé Lassana Diabaté for a performance of a work he wrote for Kronos’s commissioning initiative Fifty for the Future. The performers bring the program, which includes Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet and the world premiere of Rhiannon Giddens’s “At the Purchaser’s Option” with variations (based on a song from her forthcoming album, Freedom Highway), to Purchase College on Sunday.

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Audra McDonald performs with the New World Symphony, led by Co-Founder and Artistic Director Michael Tilson Thomas, at its annual gala in Miami on Saturday.

McDonald is nominated for an NAACP Image Award for her role as Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill on HBO; the ceremony will air live on TV ONE on Saturday. As recently reported in the Nonesuch Journal, McDonald brings the musical play to London's West End in June.