Rhiannon Giddens and multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi perform her original score for the world premiere of Nashville Ballet’s Attitude: Lucy Negro Redux at Tennessee Performing Arts Center tonight, Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon.

The ballet, choreographed, adapted, and directed by Paul Vasterling, is based on the 2015 book Lucy, Negro Redux by Caroline Randall Williams, who will add live spoken word to the performances. The piece explores the love life of William Shakespeare through the perspective of the “Dark Lady” for whom many of his famed sonnets were written. Each performance is followed by a talkback with the creators.

“We can’t do this alone,” Giddens tells the New York Times about the collaborative nature of the piece. “No one can do anything alone. And so when an ally comes in the form of Paul or Francesco, for example, it’s important to listen.” You can read the article at nytimes.com and listen to a preview of the ballet on Nashville Public radio’s Studio C at nashvillepublicradio.org.

Giddens is The Bluegrass Situation’s Artist of the Month; head to thebluegrasssituation.com to check out their playlist of “The Essential Rhiannon Giddens."

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Sam Amidon rounds out his tour of England, as special guest of singer-songwriter Laura Veirs, with a show at St Pauls Church in Birmingham tonight and afternoon and evening shows at The Barn in Winchester on Sunday. The tour concludes Monday at The Bullingdom in Oxford, after which Amidon and saxophonist Sam Gendel embark on a West Coast tour of the United States and Canada.

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A new production of Robert Ashley's 1985 opera Improvement opened at The Kitchen in New York City last night, and performances continue through next Saturday. The piece, which features a narrative that equates contemporary characters with settings and events from Spain in 1492, premiered in New York in 1991, and Nonesuch released the recording the following year.

The New York Times recently spoke with Jacqueline Humbert, who originated the lead role of Linda and can be heard on the recording, and with Gelsey Bell, who performs the role in the current production. You can read what they had to say at nytimes.com.

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Emmylou Harris is on the week-long Cayamo cruise, performing on throughout the voyage as the ship sails from Tampa, Florida, to Montego Bay, Jamaica; Costa Maya, Mexico; and back.

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Kronos Quartet and Iranian vocalist Mahsa Vahdat are in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in New York City to perform Music for Change: The Banned Countries tonight. The program highlights the rich diversity of artistic voices from Muslim majority countries and, in protest against the travel bans issued by the Trump administration in 2017, features music from the original seven, largely Muslim-majority countries on the list—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

“It’s hard to imagine a time when the Kronos Quartet was not emphatically crossing musical boundaries,” writes the New York Times in recommending tonight’s show. “But its latest project responds cogently to an era of increasingly policed and politicized borders.” The New Yorker says: "All told, it amounts to a rich and distinctive mixtape, amplifying themes of dignity, resistance, and harmonious coexistence."

Kronos continues to a concert at Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford, Connecticut, on Saturday, with a program of works by Sigur Rós, Laurie Anderson, George Gershwin, Terry Riley, John Coltrane, and Philip Glass, as well as Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet, and the world premiere of a new work composed for the quartet’s Fifty for the Future commissioning project.

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k.d. lang is among the artists to be featured on a special Austin City Limits episode of performance highlights from the 2008 Americana Honors & Awards show, airing on PBS stations across the US this weekend. She received the Americana Trailblazer Award at the event and performed “Trail of Broken Hearts.”