Kronos Quartet’s third-annual hometown festival, Kronos Festival 2017: Here and Now, began at SFJAZZ Center last night and continues over the weekend. “Kronos Quartet has spent some four decades on the cutting edge of new music, forging a vast international network of collaborators,” says the San Francisco Chronicle in a feature on the festival. “But the San Francisco string quartet’s global vision has rarely seemed as timely and urgent.”

Tonight, Kronos gives the world premiere of selections from A Coney Island of the Mind, a live performance of poetry from the 1950s by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, with the inimitable Van Dyke Parks narrating and providing the underscore. Also on the program is the world premiere of a new work from the quartet’s Fifty for the Future commissioning project and the Bay Area premiere of a piece by Terry Riley.

There’s a full day of programming Saturday, including a West African dance and drumming group; a Kronos family concert; a sold-out afternoon of works by Iranian composer Sahba Aminikia, the festival's artist-in-residence; and Thalea String Quartet performing pieces commissioned through Fifty for the Future. The festival culminates with a Kronos performance that night: the group is joined by Vietnamese composer/performer Vân-Ánh Võ for her The Odyssey: From Vietnam to America, a multimedia piece inspired by the experience of Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s; there's also a performance by chamber music ensemble The Living Earth Show and the world premieres of a new work by Aminikia and one by former Kronos cellist Joan Jeanrenaud.

“The string quartet serves better than just about anything I can think of as a salvation from all that is going on right now from which you may desperately crave respite,” says the Los Angeles Times' Mark Swed. “Kronos has never stopped taking a stand … [It] remains as geographically, politically and spiritually feisty as ever.”

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Sam Amidon returned to Australia yesterday, launching a six-city, eleven-concert tour with the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) and Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto. The tour continues with shows at Llwellyn Hall in Canberra tonight and Hamer Hall at Arts Centre Melbourne on Sunday. 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 composer 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.

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Composer/pianist Timo Andres, in celebration of Philip Glass’s 80th birthday earlier this week, joins Glass and several fellow pianists in a performance of Glass’s complete piano etudes at Booker Hall of Music’s Camp Concert Hall at the University of Richmond in Virginia on Saturday. The performances continue at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill on Monday.

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Devendra Banhart continues his two-month North American tour featuring music from his 2016 album, Ape in Pink Marble, with two shows in Colorado: at the Boulder Theater tonight and Club Red in Telluride on Saturday.

Time Out, reviewing his sold-out show in Los Angeles earlier this week, set the scene: “In these tense and uncertain times, a night in a dark theater, engulfed in Devendra Banhart's music seemed like a great form of refuge as Angelenos packed the Mayan on a Tuesday.”

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Tyondai Braxton plays a solo set at G Livelab as part of Music Nova Helsinki in Finland tonight. Praised by the Washington Post as “one of the most acclaimed experimental musicians of the last decade,” Braxton made his Nonesuch debut in 2015 with the release of HIVE1, which Q calls "a sonically absorbing experience.”

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Pianist Jeremy Denk joins the San Antonio Symphony, conducted by Eric Gratz, in a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concertos No. 19 in F major and No. 23 in A major, at the Tobin Center tonight and Saturday. Also included on the program are works by Gioachino Rossini and Felix Mendelssohn. There will be a pre-concert conversation with Akiko Fujimoto, associate conductor of the Symphony.

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As noted in the Nonesuch Journal, Richard Goode reunites with the Budapest Festival Orchestra and conductor Iván Fischer to tour the United States with music from their Nonesuch recording of the Beethoven piano concertos for the first time. They perform Piano Concerto No. 2 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark on Saturday and No. 4 at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall in New York City on Sunday. Both programs also include Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 and No. 5.

With the 2009 release of the album, Goode became 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.”

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Audra McDonald brings “Raising Voices: An Afternoon with Audra McDonald” to this year’s Modfest, an annual exploration of modern art, at Vassar College on Sunday. Following a performance, Professor of Film Mia Mask leads a discussion of McDonald’s work both on and offstage.

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 next Saturday.

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Natalie Merchant plays a set at the Ashokan Center Performance Hall, as part of the fifth annual Winter Hoot in Olivebridge, New York, on Saturday. The family-friendly festival features music; dancing; local food, beer, and wine; film; art; and nature activities for all ages. The Daily Telegraph, in reviewing Merchant’s concert in London last year, said: “As her spellbound audience swayed, it felt that we were in the presence of a rare breed: an artist who has never compromised, but instead evolved with integrity, thought and meaning.”

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Pat Metheny rounds out his US tour with drummer Antonio Sánchez, pianist Gwilym Simcock, and bassist Linda Oh in Florida this weekend: with a set at Florida Theatre in Jacksonville tonight, followed by a sold-out show at the Rose & Alfred Miniaci Performing Arts Center in Ft. Lauderdale on Saturday. After that show, the quartet sets sail on the week-long Contemporary Jazz Cruise, the lineup for which also includes saxophonist Joshua Redman.

The Washington Post, in reviewing a recent show in DC, praises Metheny’s group, writing, “They not only kept up with the master, they did so for an astonishing, often exhilarating 2 1/2 hours.”

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Conor Oberst concludes his European tour with a show at Queens Hall in Edinburgh tonight and Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin on Sunday. He heads to Australia later this month for a one-night-only performance at Sydney Opera House, before returning to the US for a full-band tour in March.

Oberst will release a new album, Salutations, on Nonesuch on March 17. The album is a companion piece to his 2016 solo album, Ruminations, and includes full-band versions of that album’s ten songs, plus seven additional songs. Oberst played a song from the albums in a BBC Radio 6 Music session with host Lauren Laverne earlier this week. You can hear the set at bbc.co.uk and pre-order the new album in the Nonesuch Store.

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Chris Thile continues his inaugural season as host of A Prairie Home Companion with a sold-out show at the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on Saturday. Joining him as special guests for the episode are Amos Lee, Jenny Lewis, and comedian Nate Bargatze. 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.

Brad Mehldau will be a guest on the show next weekend. He and Thile released their debut duo record last week 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 fact that Thile and Mehldau are as fine a pair of instrumentalists as you’ll hear anywhere doesn’t hurt a bit." The Guardian says: "Two very different musicians hit a remarkable rapport on this double album.”

Thile and Mehldau were the guests on NPR's World Cafe this week; you can hear their interview and live set here.